“I enjoy working with people of all ages,” he said.
“And I like that we all get to play a role in a patient’s
well-being.”
One question people commonly ask Kamber when
they find that he’s the new CEO of Medical City
Weatherford is, “What are you going to change?”
He has a ready response: “I wouldn’t say I am chang-
ing anything, but we are focusing on the team in two
ways,” he said. “First on our direct employees and the
doctor team. There have been many changes over the
past 15 months (since it was acquired by HCA). Not just
for employees, but for doctors as well. Employees had
to change employers, so there was a change in pay and
benefits.”
When the staff members learned of the acquisition,
they automatically wondered, “Do we have a job? Do we
not have a job?” How does a new CEO deal with that?
“There was some shock around that,” he said. “So
how do we weather that? And then there are the systems,
how we do things. How do we energize them; not that
they weren’t energized before, but how do we motivate
them and excite them about the work they do? You’re not
going to have the best results until you have the best team.
Tying it back to like, Chick-fil-A, when the team is consis-
tent, you know what you’re getting, when you get there.
They engage with the customer. People are excited about
showing up to work.”
Kamber’s first job was while he was in high school. He
worked at Ezee’s Pizza in his hometown of Corpus Christi.
It allows him to look at healthcare as a service industry.
“We are in a service industry,” he said. “To over
simplify — it sometimes doesn’t feel that way because it
feels a lot more personal than when you’re in the restau-
rant business. But think about the experience you get from
the time you leave a restaurant to when you are hungry
again and you start to think, ‘Where am I going to spend
my money?’ In the similar thread, how do we get a family
to want to come back to us when they don’t feel well
again? Or, when it’s time for their regular checkups. The
health service industry is becoming more consumer-driven
because anyone can go to the Internet to look up where
they want to have certain procedures done. Who has the
best ER wait time? I can look on my phone right now and
find out what the wait times are at a given hospital. This
makes healthcare much more consumer-focused. It is
about the patient, so in that sense, it is like the food indus-
try.”
Where would he like to see MCW in five years?
“To continue to build on the services and the qual-
ity that we provide,” he said. “To continue to watch the
growth in the scope of services, but it has to be appropri-
ate for us and what the community determines. Overall,
what’s my goal for five years from now — I’d like to see
us offering the best services we are capable of to the
patient.”
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