When Joanie White-Wagoner was growing up in Pennsylvania, instead of watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, she’d go to the hospital and hand out magazines and pitchers of ice to patients.
“I don’t remember a time I wasn’t around a hospital,” she said.
White-Wagoner, 39, is the administrator and vice president of the $150 million Baptist Health Medical Center-Conway that was scheduled to open Friday. As she sat in the hospital chapel to be interviewed, workers were busy cleaning floors inside and finishing installing signage on the exterior of the three-story building on Exchange Avenue.
She started her job in December, and she and her husband, Darren, and younger daughter, Nadyra, 14, moved to Conway.
White-Wagoner grew up on a farm in Athens, Pennsylvania, which was a “very homey, very small” community, she said. She and her three sisters were raised by their mother, a single parent, until she remarried when White-Wagoner was 13.
White-Wagoner’s extended family — her grandparents, mother, siblings, eight aunts and uncles, and a passel of cousins — lived for a while in one big Waltonesque farmhouse on her grandparents’ farm. She rode horses and picked strawberries and played outside in the summers until a fire siren sounded each night at 7:45 p.m.
One of her aunts worked in the kitchen of the community’s hospital, and White-Wagoner spent almost every weekend with her. Starting when she was about 12 years old, she’d go with her aunt to help at the hospital. Back then, rules were a little more relaxed. Later, White-Wagoner was a candy-striper.
“I’d put on that little red-and-white shirt,” she said, and she would help in any way she could.
“Growing up, I always wanted to be in health care. I wanted to be a neonatal nurse practitioner,” she said.
White-Wagoner graduated at 16 from high school — where she’d played basketball, volleyball and was in the color guard — and got her first job at age 17 as a nursing-home aide in Charleston, South Carolina, while attending college.
She changed her mind about nursing after her first clinical class, which was at a different nursing home than where she worked.
“I’d lost my grandmother two years before,” she said, which was a factor in her decision.
White-Wagoner’s first husband was in the Air Force, and he was stationed in Italy, where they lived for three years.
“It was beautiful,” she said. “I learned to cook there.”
She also took courses through the University of Maryland University College, which had a campus in Italy.
White-Wagoner joined the Air Force while in Italy, and after she and her husband divorced, she was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. She was in hospital management, and that’s where she met her future husband, Darren, a paramedic with the Air Force.
The story of her life has been going to school while working full time.
After returning from Italy, she finished her undergraduate degree at Southern Illinois University, and after she got out of the Air Force in 2003, she used her veterans benefits to earn two master’s degrees from the University of Maryland University College. She served four years in the military and was a senior airman.
“I’m proud of being a veteran,” she said. When her husband was stationed in Georgia, she started working at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which was rewarding and frustrating because of the bureaucracy, she said.
“I opened up a [VA] clinic for the first time on the Marine base; I made history for that,” she said.
Her first health care job was teaching for the College of Southern Maryland in the certified medical assistant program; then she got a position at Georgetown University as clinic administrator for the student health center.
“I ran the health side and the psychological-counseling side,” she said.
White-Wagoner did that for two years, until her grandfather got sick. Her husband was deployed to Korea, and she moved home to Pennsylvania to take care of her grandfather. She went back to her familiar hometown hospital to work.
She later became an administrator at Georgetown University Hospital in Maryland, where she was over the department of medicine.
“I love the patient side,” White-Wagoner said, although she is cut out for administration. “I think I was rounding when rounding wasn’t cool.”
White-Wagoner said she loves to build a rapport with patients and physicians.
“You’ll hear me say teamwork a lot,” she said, “because it is a team. Medicine is not an exact science, and sometimes you have to have that holistic approach to health care. … The spiritual and emotional well-being of the patient — sometimes that’s just as important.
“That’s something I think we’re really building here at Baptist Health-Conway — that holistic approach.”
White-Wagoner was the administrator at a private for-profit three-hospital system in Dallas for almost a year before she learned about the opportunity in Conway. She said Dallas wasn’t a place where she and her husband wanted to put down roots, so she worked with a recruiter to help her find another position.
She said the couple realized that Dallas was their first move in 20-something years where they weren’t told to go.
“We’re not city folks,” she said. “We wanted a community to be part of.”
Plus, the Dallas facility was the first “for-profit system” for which she’d worked, and that didn’t line up with her philosophy. “The bottom line is important, but it should never come before patient care,” she said.
The recruiter found the administrator’s position at Baptist Health Medical Center-Conway, which was under construction. “She called and said, ‘Joanie, I think I have the perfect place for you guys.’”
White-Wagoner said she had friends who had been stationed at the Little Rock Air Force Base, so she’d been to Arkansas.
As she was driving up the interstate in October for her Baptist Health interview, “I saw the trees and the mountains,” she said. “I called my husband and said, ‘Honey, this reminds me of home so much.’”
She felt even more at home after finding a place to live — on a horse ranch in Conway. White-Wagoner and her husband bought Back Achers Ranch and Legends Restaurant and renamed it Evermore Ranch and Equestrian Center and Legends Bar and Grill.
She has four horses, including a 9-month-old rescue that she saw posted on Craigslist in Dallas and got when he was 5 months old. White-Wagoner has a soft spot for animals — she also rescued a German shepherd red tick heeler that she named Ladybug. Someone had posted on Facebook that the dog and two puppies were left when someone moved.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “I drove to Hector to get her. She’s now our ranch hand.”
White-Wagoner also tweaked the restaurant menu and added her recipe for chicken Alfredo, which she learned to make in Italy.
Although she stays out of the restaurant’s kitchen, every day after work she changes from her business suit and heels to her casual clothes and boots to ride a horse or watch the riding lessons.
“I’m very hands-on, probably more than my staff wants me to be,” she said, laughing.
It might seem like a lot to take on — buying a horse ranch and a restaurant and opening a new hospital. She gives her husband credit for running the ranch, cooking their meals and helping to clean their home so she can concentrate on her new job.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Not many hospital administrators get to open a hospital in a new market and build from the ground up,” she said.
Doug Weeks, Baptist Health executive vice president and chief operating officer, said White-Wagoner stood out because of her expertise and experience.
“She had been in the hospital business for quite some time. She came up through the VA system — she’s a veteran herself,” Weeks said. “She’s done a lot of work with physician organizations, and she’d actually been the administrator, which was very beneficial in our minds to have actually been in that spot before.”
Weeks said that in addition to all her skills, White-
Wagoner’s personality makes her a good fit for the position.
“She’s very results-oriented; she’s very team-oriented,” he said. “I’ve been very impressed with the job she’s done.”
White-Wagoner said her biggest challenges have been “just figuring out the process, staff recruitment. It’s been a challenge, but a blessing. We’ve built just an amazing team here,” she said. “When you’re opening a new hospital, it’s not just transferring systems. It’s not a one size fits all. You have to redefine processes. Obviously, Conway’s not Little Rock. Things we do here have to fit into Conway culture.”
Baptist Health has hired “a few” physicians, she said, but is partnering with physicians who also have privileges at Conway Regional Medical Center.
Despite the obvious competition between the two medical centers, White-
Wagoner said, “we’re going to be good neighbors. We’re community partners. We’re here to complement [each other] and be inclusive in the
community.”
Baptist Health Medical Center-Conway employees were asked to set goals with community outreach,
she said.
“We’re getting ready to develop a partnership, possibly, with The Salvation Army for homeless health outreach,” she said. “Conway does have a homeless community. They’re no less important than a person who makes $500,000 a year.”
White-Wagoner said she and her husband plan to retire in Conway. They attend First Baptist Church in Conway, and she’s a member of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce Board of
Directors.
White-Wagoner said her military background influences her leadership, particularly in “attention to detail and trying to keep that focus.”
Cara Wade, director of system communications for Baptist Health, laughed and recalled that White-Wagoner thought the U.S. flag flying in front of the medical center was “a hair lower” than the Baptist Health flag and asked for it to be corrected. It turned out it was just the angle making the flag look lower, Wade said.
“I’m just really big on protocol,” White-Wagoner said.
A Hall of Heroes in the main entrance of the hospital has photographs of veterans who work at the hospital, including White-Wagoner.
Although she’s the administrator, if need be, she can make a bed with hospital corners and bounce a quarter off the sheets, just like she learned in basic training.
White-Wagoner may also pop up in rooms to talk to patients, or in the kitchen or gift shop to make sure everything is running smoothly.
There isn’t a place in the hospital where she doesn’t feel at home.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.