Hartford Business Journal

14 Hartford Business Journal • January 11, 2016 www.HartfordBusiness.com construction of more office and retail struc- tures in its Route 34 West development. In North Haven, Landino says the first units will go on sale next spring at Center- plan's 149-unit townhome/condominium community, Pierpont Ridge. Units will be priced at around $350,000, Landino said. "This is probably as busy as we've been since we started our company [in 2008],'' he said. A former Old Saybrook selectman and three-term state lawmaker, Landino grew up in New Haven. He has a civil engineering degree from the University of Hartford, and later was involved in co-founding Meriden land-planning/design firm BL Companies. Landino also was involved in the multi-mil- lion-dollar renovation of the state's 23 highway service plazas. n who has a wife, four children and five grandchildren, says he's up to the task. Shmerling previously worked in leadership roles at no less than five pediatric hospitals around the country in his 36-year career. He's been in healthcare markets with steep for-profit competition, like what he faced as CEO of Children's Hospital Colo- rado between 2007 and last summer. He's worked at a university-owned health sys- tem (Vanderbilt) and a Methodist system in Tennessee — his home state. He's also an immediate past chairman of the Children's Hospital Association, which has members nationwide. He even helped Irish health officials site a new national chil- dren's hospital in Dublin several years ago. It's those credentials that led CT Children's to hire Shmerling, according to Chip Gengras, chairman of the hospital's board of directors and president of Gengras Motor Cars. "Jim has been in organizations that have been in similar places to where we are right now," Gengras said. "He has a passion and experience that came through very clearly." One of the hospital's biggest challenges is that more than half of its patients are on Med- icaid, which doesn't fully cover actual costs. That helped drive budget deficits at CT Chil- dren's totaling $35 million in fiscal years 2013 and 2014, and prompted the hospital to ask, and receive, a $10 million state grant last year to shore up its finances. Shmerling insists the hospital can remain independent, but he won't rule out asking the state for another grant this year. The hospital is going through a strategic planning process to create operational efficiencies. Shmerling said he is also going to expect more from the CT Children's foundation, with a goal of approximately doubling annual fundraising to $25 million within three years. To lead that charge, CT Chil- dren's last month appointed David Kinahan, previously vice president of development at Tulane University School of Medicine, as foundation president. Shmerling also hopes to grow CT Children's patient base through pediatric partnerships with other hospitals, work already started under his predecessor, Martin Gavin. CT Children's has care agreements with Hartford Healthcare, Yale, and Baystate and Shriners hospitals in Springfield, Mass. It also has research partnerships with UConn Health and Jackson Laboratory. "We have those collaborative models," Shmerling said. "One of the things the board asked me is 'how do we expand that?' " In addition, consolidation is a difficult prop- osition for a children's hospital, which would have to compete with other, more profitable services as part of a larger hospital system. "Pediatrics doesn't make a lot of money," he said. "No big adult system wants to take that all on." Besides expanding its patient numbers, the Massachusetts partnerships are also aimed at another threat — competition. Shmerling is casting a wary gaze as far away as Boston, where he senses a coming Connecti- cut encroachment by the much larger Boston Children's Hospital, which last year acquired a sizeable pediatric practice in eastern New York that has several offices in Fairfield County. "Nothing's going to stop them," Shmerling said. "We've got to be more competitive and say 'here's the demarcation line and we're going to compete like crazy if you try to cross it.' " Shmerling also wants to move CT Chil- dren's away from fee-for-service insurance contracts towards risk-based contracts that reward the hospital for good health outcomes of a patient population, but penalizes it if it doesn't perform up to snuff. He is hopeful about a piece of federal legisla- tion that would offer a new payment model for pediatricians and primary care doctors who care for chronic and expensive Medicaid patients. Shmerling said he also plans to engage directly with insurers and Medicaid officials to see if they would be willing to design risk- based contracts. "Children are such a small part of the overall spend that I think we can convince them to experiment with us … and demon- strate whether it can work," he said. "This is an insurance town." n governor and his administration. While it might not seem like we're off to a good start with the faculty (teachers publicly voiced displeasure in October after they were asked to make sev- eral contractual concessions including allowing more part-time staffers and eliminating annual bonus payments), I think most of the faculty that I have met with, we are able to have some very constructive conversations about the future of the system," said Ojakian, who most recently was Gov. Dannel Malloy's chief of staff for four years. Ojakian said collective bargaining isn't easy, but he's committed to faculty participating in the process, which will have to result in finding cost savings. He realizes his actions will have to speak as loud as his words to the nearly 7,300 teachers whose contracts will be negotiated. "If you don't have good relationships, then you're not going to be able to do anything," Ojakian said. Ojakian, who has a two-year contract and an option for a third, is used to challenges in previ- ous state roles, including as deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management and deputy comptroller. This is another, but he sees it as an opportunity to run the CSCU system as envi- sioned, as a resource and ally to faculty. A big challenge is dealing with state sup- port not keeping up with faculty pay increas- es and more costly benefits. While student tuition and fees have risen at a higher rate than state support, Ojakian cited a need for mutual sacrifice to meet CSCU's mission with the least impact on students. The system needs to look at other ways of generating revenue, possibly through more public-private partnerships, better use of phi- lanthropy, or different kinds of tuition and fee structures, he said. "I don't think the system has ever offered to the governor or the legislature an initiative or big vision for the system," Ojakian said, citing UConn's Next Generation Connecticut initia- tive as an example. "My goal is to work with my team here and all the institutions to figure out what that is for us. I'm not afraid to go for- ward with an initiative that's going to cost more money. If it benefits the economic development strategy of our state, then I think we have a shot of getting the governor to listen to us and the legislature to buy into this, because it's a part- nership that has to happen." Ojakian also wants to remove obstacles for students, particularly those with econom- ic disadvantages. "I want to take a holistic approach to not only what's keeping all students from coming, enrolling, staying and graduating, but reduc- ing the disparity that currently exists in our institutions based on economics and race — so that's very, very important to me," Ojakian said. He also would like to see a statewide approach to better match the needs of the business community with schools and bet- ter leverage the CSCU system to meet those needs across Connecticut. Better leveraging the CSCU system and improving efficiencies is a theme. That doesn't mean cutting programs or jobs, Oja- kian said, but using technology, for example, to improve purchasing, which is now done by individual campuses rather than exploiting the state's bulk purchasing. He also wants to know if there's a better way to process financial-aid applications, perhaps at the system level, to allow campus counselors more time with students. "I want to find a way to provide our cam- puses with more hands-on opportunities with their students and less time focusing on administrative processes," he said. He also wants to better market the schools to counter declining enrollment and create a task force for recommendations. The campuses like the approach, he said. "They've never seen the system office before as a resource, they've seen it as kind of an entity to give directives, but not to work with them to accomplish a goal and that's what I want to do," he said. n 5 to Watch in 2016 Landino Shmerling Ojakian P.O. Box 2468, New Britain, CT 06050 800.969.3837 nteriors.com Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring Keep your exterior colorful and festive year round with our exterior seasonal program! indoor / outdoor plantscapes • holiday decor SENIOR ANALYST, CLIENT TECHNOLOGY (Hartford Fire Insurance Co., Hartford, CT) Req Bach's dgr (or f/equiv) in CS, Comp Eng, EE or rel fld & 6 yrs exp in job offered or in dsgn'g & tst'g universes & reports us'g SAP Business Objects & Microsoft Business Intelligence toolset (SSAS Tabular, MDX, SSRS, & PowerPivot.) Stated exp must incl: maintain'g & implmnt'g s/w apps us'g SAP Business Objects, SSAS, .NET, ASP.NET, C#, MS SQL Srvr, & Oracle; interact'g w/ end users & supprt'g business users; dvlp'g stndrd procedures & change cntrl doc templates for SAP BO & MSBI; & exp w/ gather'g reqs & dsgn'g report req templates. Resp for mgmt of on-shore & off-shore Actuarial Bus Intelligence teams. Assess systs for best practices & ensure coding meets co stds. F/T. 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