Sister Helen Amos, who has built strong programs -- and marketed them adroitly -- in eight years as president and chief executive officer of Mercy Medical Center, will become board chairwoman of Mercy's new parent organization July 1.

She has led a hospital that has remained independent in a period of mergers, has drawn more patients as the number of patients in the state was dropping, and has thrived downtown while other hospitals were chasing business in the suburbs.

"Of all the hospitals in Central Maryland, they were the star" in terms of developing and marketing programs, particularly in women's health, said Russell Frank of RAFrank Associates, a health strategic marketing consulting firm.

Amos also became widely known in the community. Calvin M. Pierson, president of the Maryland Hospital Association, said she was a strong spokeswoman on health policy and access to care, often representing the hospitals in Annapolis.

Thomas Mullen, who has been executive vice president and chief financial officer, will replace Amos as president and CEO. He will be the first layperson to serve as president of the 125-year-old hospital. Mercy is the last Maryland hospital run by a member of a religious order.

The organization Amos and Mullen led has been revamped as well. They will head Mercy Health Services, a new parent corporation overseeing Mercy Medical Center, the Stella Maris long-term care facility and other health ventures.

The reorganization also creates a fund-raising foundation, giving Amos more responsibility in that area, while Mullen assumes responsibility for day-to-day operations.

Amos and Mullen came to Mercy as administrators in 1991. Mullen had been vice president of finance at University of Maryland Medical Center. Amos had been a religious administrator, including seven years as national president of Sisters of Mercy of the Union, an order with about 6,000 members. She had also served more than a decade on Mercy Medical Center's board, but had never worked in health.

"We lacked focus in terms of how to present ourselves to the population we were trying to serve," Amos said yesterday of Mercy at the time she took over. "We were not defining ourselves as an organization. We had just been sitting here for almost 120 years, and things had just become what they had become."

As part of a strategic planning process, Mercy commissioned a Gallup survey of the downtown market and found about 150,000 people within a 10-minute walk of the hospital.

"We have the suburbs here," at least during the daytime, Mullen said. "So we went on the offensive, rather than the defensive," seeking to turn the downtown location into an asset.

Mercy began assembling programs in women's health, then a relatively new concept as a specialty. It recruited some high-profile doctors in obstetrics-gynecology and breast cancer, and promoted its programs through advertisements and a television show called "The Women's Doctor."

The number of admissions to Mercy jumped 16.6 percent from 1994 to 1997, while overall admissions in Central Maryland were down 1.6 percent.

Such success is unusual for an urban hospital, said Gerard F. Anderson, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management. "Most inner-city hospitals that are not academic medical centers are in serious trouble," he said.

The key, said Frank, was that they "began to aggressively recruit superstar physicians" and "they marketed like no one else; they spent a lot of money to change their image." While continuing to care for the urban uninsured, he said, the hospital was able to attract patients from the suburbs.

Amos said she was proud that Mercy had marketed itself well, but also that it had developed the programs to market.

During Amos' tenure, Mercy acquired Stella Maris from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. With various partners, Mercy built a primary-care physician group, a home health agency and a Medicaid HMO. It is developing a retirement community on the Stella Maris campus in Timonium.

The organizational changes, Amos said, were designed to catch up to the expanded Mercy, "to bring the corporate structure in line with our reality."

Mercy almost merged last year with North Arundel Health System, but talks ended after the deal was announced. Now, it expects to remain independent, Mullen said, unless there is "a market-changing event driving blocks of patients to large health systems. But we haven't seen that."

Like other Maryland hospitals, Mullen said, Mercy is facing in the near-term "a one-two punch," a cutback in hospital rates by state regulators and a move by the state health department to trim Medicaid reimbursements.

He said this means Mercy needs to make "a $4 million adjustment" in its $150 million annual budget to cover decreased revenue and expected cost increases. This will mean some reduction in staff, although Mercy hopes to accomplish it through attrition and redeployment, Mullen said.

"This is tough medicine for all of us," Mullen said.

Pub Date: 3/09/99