On Feb. 17, C. Lee Parmley, MD, JD, joined the ranks of distinguished physicians who have been selected to serve as chief of staff at Vanderbilt University Hospital.
Parmley, professor of Anesthesiology and chief of the Division of Anesthesiology Critical Care Medicine, first arrived at Vanderbilt in 2004. But Nashville wasn’t always on his radar. Parmley was enjoying a successful career at the University of Texas, where his roles included leading the Critical Care Fellowship Program, when a former fellow landed a job at Vanderbilt and encouraged him to visit.
Despite the fact that I wasn’t looking, I became interested in the job and the things that could be done here,” Parmley said of his inaugural trip to Nashville. “I came and saw what was going on and the camaraderie and collegiality between departments. That was very refreshing.”
As chief of staff, Parmley’s new responsibilities will include oversight for inpatient discharges, inpatient surgical and intensive care volume goals, and collaborating with hospital and VUMC leadership to enhance health system operating performance. He will serve as a physician lead for developing bundled care offerings and will lead work on Vanderbilt’s Acute Episode Management Care Model, including the inpatient operating model. Within the hospital, he will help develop and implement clinical operating policies and procedures, along with practice and productivity standards.
Learning & Leading
The son of a rural general practitioner, Parmley attended medical school at Loma Linda University in California through an Air Force scholarship program and was assigned to Lackland Air Force Base for his anesthesiology residency. He completed his military commitment in San Antonio and worked in private practice near Houston before taking a brief detour from medicine. The anesthesiologist pursued his law degree from South Texas College of Law in Houston and worked briefly in medical malpractice before returning to medicine.
In 1991, Parmley began a Critical Care fellowship at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and discovered a passion for working with critically ill patients and end-of-life and organ procurement issues. He remained on faculty at UT until moving to Nashville.
A lifelong learner, Parmley continued his education in Tennessee where he earned a Master of Management in Health Care (MMHC) degree from Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management in 2011. He is board certified in Anesthesiology and Critical Care and is a Fellow of both the American College of Legal Medicine and American College of Critical Care Medicine.
Facing Problems, Finding Answers
Diverse professional training and early exposure to healthcare give Parmley unique insight into the evolution of medicine over the past half century.“What I do as an intensivist is so different than what my dad did in rural Colorado,” Parmley said of his now 93-year-old father. “I think about that in how much growth there has been in the understanding of human physiology, pharmacology and technology, and where we go from here.”
One of the greatest changes, Parmley said, is arrival of an era where healthcare is more political than personal.
“Everyone has an opinion, but healthcare reform is the law of the land; and we have to adjust what we do to provide services needed within that law,” he stated. “Many parts can be intimidating since we don’t know what the future looks like, but that’s also the part I find appealing.”
One advantage of today’s industry is the stabilization of technological and pharmacological advancements, Parmley said. Reaching that equilibrium point means more attention can be paid to learning how to consistently and judiciously deliver what the population needs in a fair way.
“That’s a huge job and being associated with an institution like Vanderbilt is where I think these problems will be solved,” he noted. “When I thought about it carefully, the answer was clear. We have a responsibility in healthcare, and we have many opportunities to figure out how to do this and do it right.”
To that end, Parmley has devoted much of his time to helping grow Vanderbilt’s advanced practice nursing program and ensuring nurse practitioners are readily available in critical care units. He also supports the use of peer leadership to erode the silos that have divided physicians and nurses in years past, and he is committed to designing facilities and services with needs of the underserved and rural communities in mind.
“It’s easy to say, ‘That’s not my problem,’ but that’s not the way my mind approaches things,” Parmley said of the challenges facing today’s healthcare leaders.
“We’re at a point in history where we’ll need to reach down inside and find that courage and willingness to do things we haven’t done in the past. What I love about Vanderbilt is that it’s an institution that has that commitment … not just to what goes on within but also to people who might find their way here and what we offer, even if it’s sharing a thought process through a phone call. Our commitment is more broad than the patients on our campus,” he concluded.