Becoming the CEO of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health System was never a goal for Marna Borgstrom.
"I don't think I ever said to anybody coming up along the way, oh yeah, I want to be the CEO. And so the fact that I'm doing this is great, but it isn't that it was part of a grand plan," she told Becker's.
Ms. Borgstrom has been with the health system for 42 years, serving in a variety of roles prior to becoming president and CEO in 2005.
2020 was a challenging year in healthcare, and according to Ms. Borgstrom, the most challenging of her career.
"By the third week in April, we had over 800 COVID-positive inpatients in our hospitals. And this is when people were still trying to figure out what it was that we were fighting, how you best took care of patients, what it took to take care of them, how to keep your staff safe. And so, as a result of that, the budget kind of didn't matter," she said.
Connecticut hospitals and health systems were eventually forced to postpone elective surgeries because of the pandemic. It was the first time she had ever seen her organization lose money.
"We spent a lot of money that we hadn't planned to spend, and we didn't have the revenue coming in," she said.
Ms. Borgstrom said her main priorities are getting Yale New Haven back on track financially, as well as ensuring the mental and physical well-being of its staff.
She also plans to continue expanding the health system's reach.
"What we've been trying to build is a way to provide appropriate, academically-based care, closer to home," she said. "So putting a cancer satellite hospital in Greenwich, or putting a heart and vascular service line in all of our hospitals and ambulatory areas, and getting great care out closer to where people are living and working. So getting back into realizing that vision is another key thing that we're focusing on."
She attributed her success at the organization to her mentors and to taking advantage of opportunities that came her way.
"I think the secret sauce is you have to be continuously, intellectually curious," she said. "You have to be committed to doing the work that you say you're going to do and do it well. And you have to be prepared to live with your mistakes as well as your successes, so that when you do make mistakes, people know that you're going to be around to fix them and not just kind of move on."