The 2016 Lifetime Achiever in Health Care, Michael Holmes, set the tone of extreme humility for the St. Louis American Foundation’s 2016 Salute to Excellence in Health Care, held Friday, April 29 at the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac.
“A servant does not need to be commended for doing what he is told,” Holmes told the sold-out crowd of 400.
Holmes is anything but an underling. He founded Rx Outreach and remains chairman of the non-profit pharmacy’s Board of Directors. But the idea for the company came to him in prayer while he was an executive at Express Scripts, and he claims he was only serving God when he negotiated a spin-off of the non-profit company to serve low-income consumers.
The 2016 Stellar Performer in Health – Angela Brown, MD, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Washington University School of Medicine and director of its Hypertension Clinic – also spoke of basing her work in service.
She pursued medicine, she said, because it merged her “love of math and science with a spirit of service.”
Like all of the awardees who gave remarks, she credited her family with giving her the foundation to succeed and serve others. “It’s something I learned from my family,” she said, “to try to hopefully make someone else’s life a little bit better.”
More uniquely, from the lectern she identified all of the many tables of people who came to cheer her on – by their respective table numbers.
The 2016 Health Advocacy Organization of the Year Award was given to a group that exists specifically to serve low-income health consumers, the St. Louis Regional Health Commission. The commission chairman, Peter Sortino, talked about working against regional fragmentation and the complexity of the health care industry to serve these needs.
“We combined at the same table the city, county, health care providers and consumers interested in talking together about how to best serve the poor,” Sortino said.
Pat Coleman, president and CEO of Behavioral Health Response, received the Dr. John M. Anderson Excellence in Mental Health Award, co-presented with the St. Louis County Children’s Service Fund (which also helps to fund her program). She said that “humility and humanity” are prerequisites to working in health care.
“Take your eyes off yourself and put them on others, and you will be blessed,” she said a wise mentor once advised her.
The foundation also recognized seven Excellence in Health Care awardees: Anthony Bass, a medical social worker at SSM DePaul Health Center; Misty C. Farr, pharmacy manager of the Florissant Walmart; K. B. Frazier, chief audiologist at the Center for Hearing & Speech; Kena Gray, operations director for the Southern Illinois Healthcare Foundation; Kendra Holmes, vice president and chief operating officer for Affinia Healthcare; Jane Ann McWilliams-Sykes, a school nurse at Dewey International Studies School; and Michelle O’Kain, clinical nurse manager at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
The presenting sponsors were Centene Corporation and Home State Health. The gold sponsors were Aetna Better Health and BJC HealthCare. The silver sponsors were AT Home Health Care and A.Y. Still University. The bronze sponsors were Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Missouri Foundation for Health, Rx Outreach, SSM Health DePaul Hospital, St. Louis College of Pharmacy and the St. Louis Regional Health Commission.
The celebratory event featured a moment of silence for the late Ida Goodwin Woolfolk, the community leader who emceed the 2015 Salute To Excellence in Health Care. “You fix our legs,” Woolfolk told the health care awardees last year. “You fix our vital organs. You fix our eyes. You make it possible for us to work in this world.”
She passed on March 23 at the age of 72.
“Wherever something was happening that was good,” said 2016 emcee Carol Daniel, news anchor for KMOX Radio, “Ida was in the center of it.”
