In a profession where the average tenure is five and a half years, Tony Lewgood is somewhat of an anomaly. He has been at the helm of Lexington’s Shriners Hospitals for Children for 21 years and plans to stay on board at least another two years to guide the transition to a new facility on the University of Kentucky campus.
“It feels wonderful,” said Lewgood of his two decade-plus stay as hospital administrator. “You get to see projects through from start to finish.”
The first 15 years, he said, were spent growing the hospital. As the patient census began shifting more decisively toward outpatient services about 2008, Lewgood said they had to reassess and do some strategic planning that resulted in the pending relocation to an outpatient facility in 2017.
“This new ambulatory model is in step with the needs of our patients and their families,” he said. “It will better align resources necessary for pediatric surgery, be more cost effective, and will allow us to continue to be a meaningful provider in our community.” Before his rather lengthy stint with Shriners, Lewgood had long been interested in the medical field.
After growing up in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, with an avid interest in science, he went on to college to get an undergraduate degree in medical technology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His fi rst job out of school was working as a medical technologist at West Virginia University Medical Center (now Ruby Memorial). Within a year, he realized he did not want to spend his life in a lab, so he enrolled in evening classes. His Accounting 101 class happened to be taught by the president of a local bank, who told him if he wanted to do anything on the business side of health care he needed to get an MBA. Taking the advice of this trusted adviser, Lewgood went on to get his MBA from WVU.
Following graduation, he went into a Humana management training program and got his first administrative position with a Humana hospital in Indianapolis. He held several positions in his 11 years with the company, including two as CEO. He moved to Lexington in the mid-1990s to take the COO position at Humana Hospital Lexington (now Saint Joseph’s Hospital), but within a year, Humana was divesting itself of its hospitals to solely provide health insurance. Knowing Saint Joseph already had its own management team in mind, he began looking for another position.
“As luck would have it, the hospital administrator/CEO position at Shriners was open,” he said.
What Lewgood said he enjoys most about the job is the Shriners Hospitals for Children’s focus on the patient and family.
“The governing board really believes in putting the patient and the family first,” he said. Shriners Hospitals for Children, a nonprofit, covered the complete cost of patient care at their facilities up until 2010, when they began billing insurance companies and Medicaid because they could no longer aff ord to shoulder steepening health care costs. “But even with that change, we’ve remained true to our mission,” he said. “We will provide care regardless of a family’s ability to pay. It’s in our culture; it’s in our values.”
About Tony Lewgood
Work history: 21 years as administrator of Lexington’s Shriners Hospitals for Children; 11 years with Humana
Hometown: Charleroi, Pennsylvania
Education: Bachelor’s degree in medical technology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and MBA from West Virginia University
Hobbies: Fly fishing, hiking, avid Pittsburgh Steelers and University of Kentucky Wildcats fan