Philly Physician Executive Combats Big City Blight: Mitchell helps troubled hospital turn around, leads troops in his spare time. (Profile).

IN THIS ARTICLE...

Despite no money for college and little encouragement from his teachers, Eric Mitchell was determined to make something of himself. Ever since he got that plastic doctor kit when he was 7, he dreamed of becoming a physician. Learn how he achieved that goal -- and so much more.

THERE IS SOMETHING bothering Eric Ignatius Mitchell, MD, MA, GPE.

Mitchell is leading a visitor down a 4th-floor corridor in St. Joseph's Hospital, in the heart of one of Philadelphia's grittiest neighborhoods, talking about his efforts to get more dialysis machines, when he spots a tiny wad of paper on the linoleum floor.

The former college basketball whiz, a lanky 6'6" -- tall, stoops over and lays it into to a nearby trash can. He turns to a hospital physician who is passing by and jokes, "I get an extra $1,000 every time I do that."

Picking up litter is just one of the seemingly endless chores that Mitchell faces every day as senior vice president of medical affairs for North Philadelphia Health System. His ultimate mission is to turn around St. Joseph's, a once-struggling inner-city hospital, and two other health care facilities.

Just minutes before scooping up the trash, Mitchell stopped to reassure a patient's relative by speaking fluet Spanish, a language the 53-year-old orthopedist learned just a decade ago.

Now, Mitchell leads the visitor past a plaster-cast, thorn-bearing Jesus -- one of the many icons that speak to the hospital's Roman Catholic legacy -- to a window overlooking the bleak landscape of North Philadelphia's Girard Avenue and its shuttered row homes.

Graffiti patrol

He points out the flora in a tiny park outside, a spot where Mitchell successfully lobbied Philadelphia City Hall to tear down two abandoned houses. On the surrounding streets, Mitchell led doctors and hospital staff in an annual cleanup that helped rid the area of graffiti.

Mitchell -- also a career Army reservist who was the chief public health officer when U.S. troops restored the democratically elected government of Haiti in 1994 -- added several touches of military-style discipline to a hospital that had gotten a little sloppy. He opens up a metal coat locker to a display a row of gleaming, laundered physician coats. Department chief names are stitched in red; other doctors get their names in blue.

"I think it's important to have a chain of command," says Mitchell, whose towering stature, salt-and-pepper hair and paisley green bow-tie lend him an air of authority, even as he swaps his trademark "How ya doin?"' with the staff at St. Joe's.

Asked if there was poor organization when he came to the hospital, he replies: "It was more like non-organization. A lot of times you had to ask people to step up. You've got to show them that there's some redeeming value -- that they're not going to be taken advantage of, that you appreciate what they're doing."

As Mitchell is speaking, he is also reading the post-operation reports on two of his own patients and initialing them. It's the type of multi-tasking you might expect from a person who essentially performs three full-time jobs.

The sports-medicine expert still treats patients roughly 40 hours a week. Since he also became a top administrator at North Philadelphia Health System, St. Joseph's and its sister facility, Girard Medical Center, the facilities survived a wave of hospital closures in the Philadelphia region and are emerging from a fiscal morass that included bankruptcy back in the late 1980s.

The system started turning profits around the time Mitchell arrived in 1994. The profits convinced the federal government to engineer a $24 million bailout package in 1997 that lowered the system's debt.

Today, Mitchell proudly shows all his visitors a model of the hospital's dream for the future. It is a $24-million, six-story hospital building that North Philadelphia Health System wants to build on a parking lot across the street from its dingy current quarters that were built in the late 1970s. The new structure is a vision that's on hold right now.

Hoops and hopes

But if it's like any of Mitchell's other dreams, it won't stay unfulfilled for long.

Mitchell decided he wanted to become a physician when he was just 7 years old, when his parents gave him a plastic doctor's kit as a present.

The idea seemed like a long shot.

Mitchell was one of seven children growing up in a small apartment in a working-class section of Washington, D.C. His father, who worked on the D.C.-to-New York mail train, pushed his offspring to study hard but also made it clear there wouldn't be money to pay for college.

But Mitchell got several breaks early on. A member of the city's small community of black Roman Catholics, Mitchell was able to attend parochial schools in an era when the local public schools were still mostly still segregated and African-Americans were bussed to inferior classrooms.

Shortly before Mitchell entered high school, his dad took him to watch a high school basketball phenom named Lew Alcindor and his Power Memorial team defeat a Washington-area Catholic school DeMatha High.

His father was gently dismissive when the boy, who was starting an adolescent growth spurt but had little hoops experience, said he wanted to attend DeMatha and play for its legendary coach, Morgan Wooten. But some months later, when the still-growing Mitchell entered DeMatha for his first day of classes, Coach Wooten tapped the surprised freshman from behind and told him to show up for practice.

So it was that Mitchell was on the court when DeMatha handed Power Memorial and the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the only loss of his storied high school career.

It's 'Dr. Mitchell' to you

Actually, getting into medicine proved to be more of a struggle for Mitchell than playing basketball.

It was the mid-1960s, and black students were typically steered away from pre-med courses. At DeMatha, a guidance counselor, John Moreland, even tried to convince him not to apply to college.

"And I was on an advanced track, I had taken calculus, I had taken geometry, I had taken algebra, and two years of a language," Mitchell recalls. "And I thanked him but I told John Moreland that I was going to go on to college and be a physician. When I go back to DeMatha, I never let John call me "Iggey" or "Mitch" or "Eric" -- I require him to call me "Dr. Mitchell.

"And hopefully it was a lifetime lesson," Mitchell adds. "Don't ever underestimate the human mind and the human will."

Indeed, when Mitchell graduated from DeMatha in 1967, in the top 10 percent of his class, offers of full scholarships began pouring in from UCLA -- where Alcindor went -- North Carolina, Michigan and some southern colleges looking for an academic standout to integrate their all-white basketball teams.

Instead, Mitchell enrolled at St. Joseph's University (no affiliation with the hospital) in Philadelphia, a small Jesuit college that was known for producing doctors as well as winning basketball teams. The only black student living in the campus dorms for a time, Mitchell nevertheless thrived at St. Joe's and was ultimately accepted into the University of Pennsylvania's top-rated medical school.

Mitchell interned at Philadelphia General Hospital, a city-funded facility that's now closed. It catered primarily to a lower income clientele on the city's western side. "People said to me, 'Why are you going there?' and I said I believed it afforded me the opportunity of a lifetime. And it did."

Nevertheless, his career path to serving Philadelphia's poor took a detour into orthopedics, which he studied as a resident at Penn. He worked on a research program that focused on making bone matter out of electricity and established a successful practice that involved everything from treating Olympians to patients with tennis elbow. He also made a home in the heart of Philadelphia's Center City, where he lives today with two sons, aged 16 and 14.

Guard duty

It was around this time that a colleague at Penn encouraged him to join the National Guard.

It marked the beginning of a 20-year military career for Mitchell, who is currently a colonel in the medical corps of the Army Reserve and also works with the Inspector General's office of the Department of Defense on health care issues.

The job requires Mitchell to be willing to go anywhere on a moment's notice. That was the case in the fall of 1994.

One morning, a call came into his Philadelphia orthopedics office asking to speak with "Colonel Mitchell."

"I said, 'Good morning, Colonel Mitchell here,' and he said, 'Colonel, you're to report to Fort Drum, New York, at 2200 hours. Any questions, please talk to a general."'

Click.

It turned out that Mitchell was on his way to Haiti, where U.S. troops helped restore democracy. He packed about 10 days worth of clothes, but ended up staying as a medical advisor to top brass for about six months.

Lucky break

An accident of fate brought Mitchell to St. Joseph's and North Philadelphia Health System.

The struggling hospital had lost its only orthopedic surgeon. A patient from the neighborhood had fallen off a ladder and broken both his wrists, but he refused to let doctors in the emergency room transfer him to another hospital. St. Joseph's director of nursing tracked down Mitchell and begged him to come treat the patient, even though Mitchell didn't have privileges at St. Joe's.

"I said I'm not even dressed. I'm in Bermuda pants and a khaki shirt. She said, 'Dr. Mitchell, we'll make all of the exceptions if you can help us.' I said, I'll be there in ten minutes."

After that, officials at the health system started lobbying Mitchell to join the staff. It was then that the longtime orthopedic surgeon first considered making the move into administration.

"Lord Baltimore once said that power only yields to one other thing -- an equal or greater power," he recalls. "I said I would not come unless I could find a position in the institution where I could make a difference. I said orthopedics is easy enough to buy, but what I want to do is get into an organizational structure where I can make a difference."

He learned that North Philadelphia Health Systems had gone without a vice president for medical affairs for two-and-a-half years.

Mitchell has rarely stopped moving since he accepted the post. He quickly made recruiting young doctors to the hospital a top priority, and he dramatically improved St. Joseph's rating from the state while sharply raising the percentage of minorities on the staff.

He spurred the hospital to follow competitors and move toward performing most surgery on an outpatient basis, freeing up space in the cramped facility.

He also learned to be something of a salesman -- not much of a problem for someone with Mitchell's sense of self-confidence. He persuaded local businesses like Girard College -- which is just several blocks away, but was sending ill students to a hospital many miles away on the city's western fringe -- to begin working with St. Joseph's.

On his walking tour, he proudly shows off a patient room redone with pink curtains, a four-poster bed and a contemporary-art print. It's the result of a $5,000 gift from one of his patients.

The hospital's best ambassador

More importantly, Mitchell is constantly thinking of ways to improve health care for people who live in one of the poorest zip codes in urban America.

His latest project is a push for telemedicine where patients could use videoconferencing equipment at remote locations like community centers to speak with a physician, rather than come into the emergency rooms.

Even with his military mindset, he is beloved by the hospital staff. Workers from the cafeteria and other corners of the hospital stopped to hug Mitchell -- who was celebrating his birthday that day -- as he passed through.

Catherine Kutzler, the CEO of St. Joseph's Hospital and a trained nurse, laughs as she talks about Mitchell's attempts to bring Army-style discipline to what was once a very chaotic health care facility. "It's that military personality -- we've tried to break it," she chuckles. "And the cleanliness."

Kutzler says Muchell's greatest achievement is recruiting more African-Americans and other members of minority groups to work at St. Joseph's, which serves a predominantly black neighborhood. It's important "that the patients feel they are receiving care by someone who understands their culture."

In recent years, Mitchell plunged into learning more about hospital administration, taking courses on finance and management issues. Earlier this year, Mitchell became a Certified Physician Executive.

Running a big-city hospital isn't Mitchell's last or greatest ambition, however. A decade ago, he also earned a master's degree in international relations from Rhode Island's Salve Regina College. It was there that he learned to speak Spanish.

He hopes to become an ambassador someday.