John Sackett: Double shift for hospital CEO.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Executive Edge - CEO of Avista Adventist Hospital and Porter Adventist Hospital - Brief Article

AS JOHN SACKETT SEES IT, THE ONLY drawback to being CEO of two hospitals is that he'll no longer know every doctor, nurse and orderly by name.

Sackett was the key figure in the launching of Avista Adventist Hospital of Louisville in 1990 and remains the hospital's CEO. In February he took on the additional role of CEO of Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver.

"My job has changed in that I'm less intimate with the organization," Sackett says. "At Avista, I know almost all the employees by their first name. That'Il change, and I regret that."

Sackett, 44, began his career in health care 19 years ago right out of grad school at the University of Colorado, starting out as an administrative assistant at Boulder Memorial Hospital, which later was sold to Boulder Community Hospital.

Launching a hospital in Louisville took some foresight and a leap of faith.

"I believed the corridor between the university and the new airport would be ideal for high-tech growth," says Sackett, who also started the first eating-disorders program in Colorado nearly 20 years ago.

"At the time, Louisville was pretty much open fields, and people thought it was a very radical idea. They couldn't believe we'd be moving out to where all the cows were. Fortunately for me, the growth that I felt was coming did come. It actually came in a bigger way than I had ever anticipated."

Sackett's biggest challenge 1 2 years ago was recruiting physicians to a new facility. To do that, he knew he needed to build a doctor-friendly habitat, something that would attract them: a golf course.

"Without physicians, hospitals can't do anything," Sackett says. "We had to have houses for them in our community. I decided maybe we should have a golf course. So it was my idea to work with the city to put in the Coal Creek Golf Course."

With the golf course came houses, and with the houses came doctors.

Sackett's dual CEO role is all the more remarkable when you consider he has cystic fibrosis, a genetic pulmonary disease that claimed the life of his sister, Audrey, five years ago at the age of 34.

"You're born with it, it's genetic," says Sackett, who has a wife and two children. "I have to work at managing it. I run a mile every day, and I'm very disciplined in my life; I make sure I get sleep, and I'm interested in being very healthy. And I have a great, great doctor. CU by the way, has the nation's best pulmonary program. A lot of people don't know that."

As a hospital administrator Sackett is...