By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A health care executive from northwest Missouri will soon become president of the Missouri Hospital Association.
Jon Doolittle currently serves as president of the Mosaic Medical Center in Albany. Doolittle applied after serving on the association board.
“I’ve become a big fan of the association over the years,” Doolittle tells St. Joseph Post in an interview. “They’ve done great things for us and I’ve enjoyed working with the staff and so, despite my sadness about leaving my home town, I’m very excited to be given this opportunity and to continue to try and help the best I can to have a great health care system in Missouri and work well with all the stakeholders who help that happen.”
Doolittle will succeed Herb Kuhn, who has served as Missouri Hospital Association president for 12 years. Doolittle will begin his new duties in late October.
Doolittle is becoming president of the Missouri Hospital Association during a critical time for health care.
“It absolutely is a time of incredible transition and demand on hospitals and health systems,” according to Doolittle.
Doolittle says the coronavirus pandemic has dominated the past year-and-a-half and has accelerated the radical transformation of the nation’s health care industry.
“While COVID has had us focused perhaps more near term and more narrowly for the last year-and-a-half, those broader economic forces, technological changes, and everything else absolutely have been continuing.”
The association must work to help its members navigate the changes, according to Doolittle.
“One of the roles of the association is to help our members prepare for that transformation and work through strategic planning and change so that they can continue to provide great service to the people of the state,” Doolittle says.
Doolittle says his goal will be to help Missouri hospitals adapt and thrive.
“And just really helping our health care system and the quality of life for Missourians continue to move forward,” Doolittle says. “We’re blessed to have the health care system that we have in the state of Missouri today.”
Doolittle has been at Albany for 11 years. He led its transition into the Mosaic Life Care system in 2014. A graduate of Harvard, Doolittle first worked at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City before he moved to Cerner in Kansas City, where he first got into health care.