Vero has more than its share of retirees, people who move here in pursuit of nothing more than leisure.
For Dr. Greg Rosencrance, who on New Year’s Day became president of the freshly incarnated Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital, his arrival in Vero marks the culmination of a plan to finish off his career with a bang – as head of a hospital within the esteemed Cleveland Clinic health system.
That decision, to leave his childhood home of Charleston, West Virginia, and his post as chair of the Department of Medicine at West Virginia University’s medical school and join the Cleveland Clinic in Weston, Florida, was a strategic one.
It was 2014; he and his wife Jackie were then in their early 50s, and had deep roots in Charleston, where they were high school sweethearts and went on to raise two sons, both of whom live there still.
But Rosencrance realized if he was ever to pursue a larger career, it needed to be then. “I had done every role that was possible to do there. I enjoyed it, it was a lot of fun, and I could have stayed there. But life is short, and the timing was kind of now or never to do something different. Career-wise, in your mid-50s, people say ‘Ah, they’re never leaving,’ and they stop calling,” said Rosencrance.
Not to mention that the offer was coming from the esteemed Cleveland Clinic. On top of that, the job, director of the Medicine Institute and chairman of internal medicine, was in sunny Weston, Florida, not Cleveland, Ohio.
He took the job, and Jackie Rosencrance found one too. With a degree in healthcare administration, she was director of development at WVU med school, and in Weston, got a job as a researcher in colorectal health.
The move to Weston was a great one, Rosencrance said. They loved Florida, so much that, three years later, when the director of the Medicine Institute in Cleveland was leaving his post and called to see if Rosencrance would consider taking his place, Rosencrance hesitated.
“To be honest, I was very happy in Florida. It was a close decision. We almost stayed in Florida, but we erred on the side of, you know, it’s a once-in- a-lifetime offer. And it was great.”
In Cleveland, he oversaw physicians practicing adult primary care, geriatrics, pediatrics, family medicine, hospital medicine and infectious disease. Rosencrance helped those physicians make the transition to value-based care from fee-for-service, an ongoing and challenging shift in healthcare that has doctors being reimbursed for the quality of the care they deliver, as opposed to the individual services they provide.
He also helped launch a population health initiative known as Cleveland Clinic Community Care that focuses on population health, a field Rosencrance cites as one he is most passionate about.
Three years after assuming the system-wide post in Cleveland, Rosencrance got a call from his former boss and close friend, Dr. Wael Barsoum, president and CEO of Cleveland Clinic Florida.
Barsoum offered him the chance to come to Vero.
“I don’t think anybody grows up thinking they want to be a hospital president,” said Rosencrance, reflecting back on a recent event at the Vero hospital’s cafeteria, when students from Vero Beach and Sebastian River high schools gathered for Health Care Day.
At that event, Dr. Ralph Turner, who became Cleveland Clinic Indian River’s COO in March, went down a list of jobs – nurse, doctor, pharmacist, and so on – asking students to raise their hands if they hoped to fill those posts one day. “And who wants to be a hospital president?” he asked.
“As you would expect, no one raised their hand,” said Rosencrance, laughing.
Still, anyone tracking Rosencrance’s talents might have seen this coming. The only child of a chemist and a nurse, Rosencrance majored in chemistry at UWV, expecting to head to Texas A&M for a Ph.D., followed by a career in research.
He was spending the last summer of college in a lab working on a paper on Raman spectroscopy – a way of analyzing materials by hitting molecules with lasers – when he had an ‘aha!’ moment.
“You know, I like to talk a lot,” he said. Working as a chemist, he feared, might not sate his voluble urges. “So I said, what else can I do?”
Following his two roommates’ lead, he took the exam for dental school, and did well. He sent in his application for dental school, but withdrew it when his roommates came home with two bars of Ivory soap, with the assignment of carving out a couple of teeth.
Rosencrance was incredulous.
“If you have to carve teeth out of soap, I can’t do that,” he told himself.
Instead, he took the MCAT, the test for medical school admission.
“And here I am,” he said. “That was my pathway to medicine.”
Rosencrance predicts it will take up to a decade to fully integrate Cleveland Clinic Indian River with the main Cleveland Clinic operation in Cleveland, a point he describes ambitiously as “when you step foot in Indian River and you step foot in Cleveland and you wouldn’t see a difference.”
But he wasted no time integrating into Vero. In his first months here, he gave some 45 presentations around town, taking questions, reassuring skeptics and giving people a sense of his patient-first philosophy, his reassuring personality, and the seriousness with which he is pursuing his mission here – caring for his patients and staff as though they were family, and the hospital as though it were his home, as he often says.
In his time off – at this point, a very precise interlude between dawn and noon on Saturdays – he fishes the Indian River Lagoon with a guide, or hits balls at Big Shots Golf.
“We love it here,” he says. “I view this as a last stop, a long-term role for me, as long as the Clinic and the board of Indian River want me here.”
