In 1974, the headlines in the Times Picayune announced that Lee Frazier (’74) was “the first Tulane graduate” to take over Charity Hospital. Never mind that at 25 he was also the youngest executive director of the 1,800-bed facility or that he was the first African American to do so – all the news was focused on his Tulane degree.
Now the executive vice president of St Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock, Ark., he chuckles over a memory more than three decades old.
Frazier confesses that he is not following the current debate over the future of Charity Hospital in great detail.
“I had such a love affair with Charity because of what it meant to everyday citizens in the state, what it meant to training for men and women around the world,” he says. Frazier says he still values the life long relationships he has formed with many of the international medical students who spent some time in Charity’s halls. “While a lot of people looked at it as the city hospital for the knife and gun club, we really were doing world-renowned research. It was a place where exotic illnesses could be treated and we did just such wonderful work in so many different areas and never really got recognized in a lot of those areas.”
Never one to shy away from the political fracas, Frazier emphasizes the value of a training hospital doing cutting edge research.
“That’s what I think the city and the state need again, they really need a Mayo-clinic type atmosphere with Charity as the anchor, with Tulane and LSU together because they both bring resources to the table but can’t afford to be the city hospital,” he says. “So rather than LSU or Tulane trying to be the city hospitals or compete for Medicare and Medicaid patients – Charity can provide resource money as well as patients for teaching and training. There you would get your best use of tax dollars.”
Frazier was a part-time New Orleans native growing up. His mother was from New Orleans but his father hailed from Washington D.C., so he split much of his childhood and teen years between the two. Then he enrolled at Loyola University (where he also was a first – the first black football player) and in the early 1970s began working at Touro Infirmary under executive officer Murray Diamond. Frazier cut his administrative teeth as the business manager for the surgery department working for a rigorous Army nurse.
“I guess Dr. Diamond was my inspiration for going into hospitals. He was a fantastic mentor. This was two years before I went to graduate school so I’d had an inside grasp of how hospitals should be run, particularly services such as nursing,” he recalls. “That was the beginning of my involvement in healthcare.”
He entered the health systems management program at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at a time when “we were still graduating students who, within one or two years of graduation, were going out and taking over hospitals.”
Frazier and Tulane alumnus Nolan Duhe (’73) were among the first African-American students in the program.
“When I went to Tulane in 1971, I was the first African American that they had in the program,” recalls Duhe, who stays in touch with Frazier. “They had one or two students from the continent of Africa. Lee came behind me – he was a student at the time at Loyola University in New Orleans. I could see that he had a lot of promise. He was very ambitious and willing to work hard so I knew he was going places.”
Frazier credits Duhe, a pharmacist by training, with helping him to stay focused on the details while dreaming of a bright future in healthcare management.
“He’s taken on a number of very challenging jobs, very challenging assignments in Harlem at one time, and Big Charity in New Orleans,” observes Duhe, now retired from a career with the Veteran’s Administration.
“Dr. Walter Burnet, who was chairman of the department, was certainly instrumental in focusing my attention on not only healthcare but challenging the role of the administrator/CEO of hospitals,” Frazier says. “During those times, it was still the diving board into the deep. You didn’t go into the wading pool first.”
So, naturally, he graduated and took on the role of leading Charity Hospital and its 2,700 employees. Then he moved on to Columbia Presbyterian’s Harlem Hospital. There Frazier says he encountered a more unionized culture – and in fact, he arrived in the middle of a healthcare workers’ strike. Despite the polarization, in Harlem Frazier began to build outreach clinics that brought healthcare into the community and are a hallmark of his philosophy of healthcare delivery.  | During his tenure at Charity, Lee Frazier was a
hands-on administrator, working directly with
on-duty nurses and technicians to manage the
issues of the day. |
“I think healthcare is evolving to primary levels, that is providing care where people live and work,” says Frazier. “The more that that is done, you get into a better ability to provide preventive medicine, which from a healthcare point of view is really where you want to go. Healthcare is so expensive that by the time you get into critical nature of a problem you spend hundred times as much to make a correction as you would have preventing the problem or catching it in its early stages. Primary prevention should get us back to that. Primary care then was attempting to do that.”
Over his career, Frazier has taken note of the changing nature of healthcare provision.
“When I started in healthcare, doctors and hospitals did not get paid unless they put their hands on you and then we got away from that, to say we are going to pay you not to touch somebody. You pay for healthcare plans to be there in case someone needs help. More and more we are beginning to understand that you get funded more if you understand a medical condition and don’t just pay somebody blindly,” he says.
He continued to advocate for neighborhood-level clinics when he moved to the University of Chicago’s affiliate hospital, Provident Hospital in Chicago, Ill.
“That was a lot of fun, a smaller hospital within a large system,” says Frazier. “Only a few million people less than New York but spread out so there are a lot of neighborhoods and they would call for interventional challenges just being neighborhoods.”
From there he went on to tackle his first job outside of the academic hospital arena, St. Vincent’s in Little Rock, Ark. He left briefly to start the Arkansas Heart Hospital, a for-profit hospital focused on cardiology, and then returned to the St. Vincent where he is now executive vice president.
“My goals now are to grow business and to provide better care in the community,” says Frazier, who started two outreach programs, a multiple sclerosis clinic and a pain management clinic. “ I want to be the premier provider in the state. The good thing is that I have three physician champions in those areas, and that’s what’s going to make it successful.”  |
Frazier credits his lifelong faith, loving family and ability to dream big with his success, but he offers the following tips to those coming after him in healthcare leadership:- “Stay grounded. Don’t be bigger than the talents you have -- and make sure you know your talents. If you are weak in finance have a strong financial person, if you are weak in people skills, get good human resources personnel. “
- “Try to find out what the needs are of the people you are serving. Ask them – don’t guess, don’t get sophisticated with surveys and all kinds of gimmicks. Just go ask your public. Send a letter, call a town house meeting, visit them.”
- “Make your employees your partner because you are not going to be any better or worse than they are. Nobody will ever see your diploma – many of the people your patients will see who represent you probably barely got out of high school. So make them your partners."
- “The healthcare system is going to continue to change, so just hold on – don’t get comfortable. The complexity of it is because we have so many stakeholders. Even providers are at odds with one another, whether it’s nurses or physicians – it’s not just the current administration of policy makers but it’s also the unions, the insurance companies who will have a say in terms of how providers behave. So stay involved, stay active, stay political.”
Frazier has lived his advice to stay political. In addition to steering healthcare organizations through growth and change, Frazier has also represented his constituency as a Louisiana state representative in a district with an 80 percent white population, and in 1983 was voted "Legislator of the Year."
As busy as he has been, when Frazier takes a moment to look over the span of his life, he says, “We are just blessed. The best way to describe my life is one of just being blessed and knowing that I am blessed also makes me want to give back.” |
Editor: Dee Boling
Assistant Editor: Laura Horne
Contributing Writers: Keith Brannon, Laura Horne,
Donna Kulawiak, Arthur Nead, Fran Simon, Madeline Vann
Photographers: Paula Burch-Celentano, Dominica Fotino, Alicia Duplessis Jasmin,
Jeffery Johnson, Carl Kendall, Rick Olivier, Ryan Rivet, Margarita Silo, Brady Skaggs We continually seek content for publication. Please submit alumni notes, stories, and photographs to Editor, Global Health, 1440 Canal Street, Suite 2430, TW-13, New Orleans, LA 70112 or to globalhealth@tulane.edu. |
