Finding a calling in health care

Sometimes in life, it seems like you know exactly what you want to do, but a person or a novel experience can have a profound effect and forever change your trajectory.

This was the case for Evan Bailey, group practice director for the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. When he was growing up in Lee’s Summit, Evan had a direct connection to working in a healthcare system. His father Lenton Bailey worked in the security department at what was then called Truman Medical Centers. But working in health care wasn’t something he was originally interested in pursuing.

After graduating from Lee Summit High School, Evan left the Midwest to obtain a business degree from Florida A&M University. His original plan was to complete his business degree and then go into law school, a path walked by many of his classmates, but an internship and a meeting with John Bluford became a pivotal changing moment in his life.

The summer after his junior year, Evan returned to Kansas City to join the second cohort of interns for the Bluford Healthcare Leadership Institute.

“It was a really eye-opening experience,” Evan said. “A lot of people think about the practitioners that you see most often that are so valuable to be able to deliver safe, equitable care to our communities: our doctors, our nurses, our medical assistants. But there are a lot of folks that are also contributing more behind the scenes and help to influence decisions related to policy; influence decisions related to where we start clinics, what new geographies we move into, and sort of how healthcare as a system evolves. That interested me and I saw an overlap between some of the skills that I was learning in business school and some of the challenges that existed within healthcare.”

After graduating with a master’s in business administration, from Florida A&M, Evan moved to Detroit to start his career at the Henry Ford Health System. Currently, Evan is the group practice director for general surgery, bariatrics, surgical oncology, breast cancer surgery, and acute care surgery.

His role allows him to work directly with physicians and other practitioners to make sure that the areas under his scope are providing the best outcomes for the patients that they serve. But the most important part of his position is being in the room when discussions are happening that can affect large communities by making systemic changes.

“With my position, there is the potential to impact people on more of a macro and systems-based level,” Evan said. “At a higher levels, how are we thinking about ensuring that care is equitable for people who may only live three miles apart, but might be in two different zip codes? What sort of economic impact does a large healthcare organization have in its community? And how does that organization, because delivery systems can’t do it all, so how do we partner with organizations like Health Forward who specialize in certain things to make sure that we’re truly impacting people at the ground level because it is going to take a partnership to solve some of these issues.”

It’s these systems-level changes and the importance of having diverse health system practitioners, but also an administration that reflects the populations they serve that is a driving force for Evan. He believes that there are a lot of talented people who would have great careers in health care but wouldn’t know about the possibilities for jobs outside of being a practitioner because they’ve never been exposed to other options.

“It doesn’t matter whether you work in a non-healthcare space if you have some core skills like working well with people, if you can solve problems, if you can manage issues and ask the right questions, then you can be a leader in healthcare,” Evan said.

John W. Bluford, founder and president of Bluford Healthcare Leadership Institute, said that Evan’s work has already been attracting inquiries from other major cities, but he hopes he would return to help make Kansas City better.

“Evan Bailey has been a stellar performer before, during and after his stint in the 2014 Bluford Healthcare Leadership Institute cohort,” Bluford said. “Over the course of the past 7-8 years he has established himself as an aspiring healthcare leader both in the Detroit metropolitan area and across the nation.”