As a teen, Bill Manns was already on the road to becoming a physician. In fact, he was so determined that he turned down a full-ride scholarship to Michigan State University to attend the University of Michigan, with the intention of going to medical school. He worked one summer in a morgue to see if he could “handle the blood and guts of it.” But one day, walking across campus, he saw a banner promoting a summer internship program that ultimately changed his career trajectory.
“I remember somebody had put up a banner that said, ‘Careers in Health Care,’ and it had administration in tiny letters,” the CEO of Bronson Healthcare Group recalls. “I didn’t know what health care administration was. I applied for this internship, got it, and I’m placed at an inner-city hospital. One Monday we had our CEO Council and the issue of the day was gunshot wound victims coming into our emergency department.”
The meeting was attended by the hospital’s leadership, and safety was a key discussion topic because sometimes the victims came in armed could be accompanied by fellow gang members or whoever shot the victim might follow them to the ER to finish the job.
Manns, now 58, was a junior in college then, sitting in a leather swivel chair in what he describes as “one of the nicest board rooms I’ve ever been in,” taking it all in. After much discussion, the solution proposed was to equip hospital security guards with handheld metal detectors to check those coming into the ER for weapons.
“We’re a busy inner-city ER seeing 70,000 or 80,000 visits a year,” Manns says. “And I spoke up and said I had a question. And the CEO was pretty condescending, saying, ‘Little Billy has a question.’ So, I clear my throat and ask, and this was a defining moment for me, ‘What criteria are we going to use to determine who you stop?’
“You could have heard a pin drop on that plush carpet. And it was at that point that I looked around and saw I was the only person not wearing a dark blue, black or gray suit. I was the only person under 55 in this room. I was the only Black guy.”
“I cannot envision myself trying to get into an emergency department being worried about one of my loved ones while somebody else who didn’t look like me walked right in while I’m getting frisked. And that was the point,” he says. “It was at that moment that I realized I can have a direct one-on-one impact being a physician, but I can have a global impact being a health care executive.”
Manns realized that these executives had a markedly different perspective from his own. Having grown up in Detroit, Manns had experienced being pulled out of his car by police, frisked and thrown against a wall.
Manns switched majors, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in organizational psychology. He went on to earn a master’s degree in health services administration from U of M’s School of Public Health.
What followed has been a fast trip up the career ladder, with positions that have taken him from Detroit to California and back to Michigan. He was president of Mercy Health Saint Mary’s, a health network in Grand Rapids, when he landed the CEO role at Bronson Healthcare Group in 2020.
Responsiblity to the community
For Manns, the role at Bronson was attractive because of the hospital group’s emphasis on aiming for health equity and addressing health disparities. “It was really intentional on the board’s part that equity is at the center of our plan for excellence, our strategic plan. We’re the largest employer in the region and the preferred health provider in the region,” he says. “We have a responsibility to this community. And that intentionality drives a lot of what we do. It means the world because we can impact and start to really move that needle.”
Manns saw the challenge of tackling health disparities in the community on the first day of his new job, which was March 20, 2020, as the world was within the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the early months of the pandemic, people of color were contracting and dying from the virus at a rate 1.4 times higher than those in the white community, according to covidtracking.com. When the vaccines came out, Bronson personnel were on the front lines in clinics throughout the community administering the shots, but Manns said participation among people of color in the greater Kalamazoo community was low, due to stigma and fear.
The hospital forged partnerships with area churches and the Family Health Center to provide the vaccines if they could figure out ways to get them into the community.
“One of the coolest things we did was a drive-through vaccination site at Stones Church. We had Pastor (Addis) Moore of Mount Zion (Baptist Church, a predominantly Black church in Kalamazoo’s Northside neighborhood) get the vaccine. When you think about the fear that was happening at the time, to have folks like that say ‘I got the shot, and it’s OK’ and then to say ‘We’re going to do it at a church, and you don’t even have to get out of your car,’ it really decreased the stigma, anxiety and fear.”
The result was that both Kalamazoo and Calhoun counties achieved equivalency between Blacks and whites in terms of mortality from Covid. “It was being able to immunize so many people so quickly in partnerships with the rest of the community,” Manns says. “It was not just a Bronson problem. We are part of the community, and we decided to solve it together.”
At the same time, Manns was able to see the staff, physicians and employees under his watch perform under pressure. “It could have been incredibly stressful and torn the team apart, but we really jelled around ‘How do we ensure that Bronson is here for another 125 years, and how do we do the right thing?’ I saw the team really become one. The employees responded, the mid-management responded, the executives responded, the board responded, and you just felt everybody come together for the community.”
Indicators of success
The outcomes of the Covid vaccine program have not been the only indicators of Bronson’s success under Manns’ leadership. As he observes his fifth anniversary as Bronson’s CEO at the end of this month, he’ll have a list of impressive accomplishments to celebrate.
In the past five years, Bronson’s Medical Group has grown by 25 percent and has more than 800 physicians and advanced practice professionals. Bronson has opened a slew of facilities, including seven new primary-care locations, a new Cancer Center in Kalamazoo, new urgent-care locations in Battle Creek and downtown Kalamazoo, and a new hospital in South Haven. It has added 1,000 new employees since 2020, and, according to Manns, staff retention rates at Bronson are better than national averages.
In total, Bronson Healthcare Group now has about 9,300 employees and more than 70 locations serving Southwest and South-Central Michigan.
At the same time, the health care group has garnered accolades. In February, it was recognized as one of America’s 250 Best Hospitals by Healthgrades, an online source for health care information. This month Bronson is being named a 2024 Elite Winner of the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For by the National Association for Business Resources — an honor given to only 14 companies a year. Bronson is the only winner in Michigan.
Remaining independent
That kind of success can bring attention, and in a world where large health care conglomerates gobble up smaller organizations or two large health care organizations merge, Bronson might seem ripe for the picking.
(In 2023, Grand Rapids-based Spectrum Health merged with Beaumont Health to create Corewell Health, the largest in-state health care system in Michigan. And last year, as part of a joint venture, Ascension Michigan hospitals, including Ascension Borgess, and Genesys hospitals were incorporated into the larger Henry Ford Health.)
Not to worry, says Manns. “We’re too big to be small,” he says laughing, “and we’re too small to be big.”
Joking aside, Manns stresses that Bronson’s deep connection to the community it serves and the local makeup of its board of directors are key factors that will keep the organization independent.
“It’s a local board, and the fact that those men and women receive services here and their neighbors receive services here, the decision process is different. I’ve worked for large health systems and just having that connection with the board is different,” he says. “When you’re the largest employer, the chances are as you go out, somebody somewhere you meet works for Bronson. And that’s meaningful. That connection and that culture, we’ve got to protect that and keep it. So, we’ll do the right thing for the community.”
Expanding and contributing
As Bronson’s services have expanded, its footprint has as well, especially in the Kalamazoo area. Since 2005, it has acquired several downtown properties, including the former Upjohn headquarters on John Street and the former Kalamazoo Gazette building. And in 2024, it purchased the former Stryker headquarters on Airview Boulevard, just north of the Kalamazoo-Battle Creek Airport.
As a nonprofit corporation, Bronson is exempt from paying property taxes on its growing property holdings, which has rankled some in the community. But, Manns says, “one of the things that I don’t think people consider is that last year we provided $147 million of uncompensated care — about $403,000 a day.”
In addition, he says Bronson, whose revenue has nearly doubled since 2020, funnels its profits into its employees, technology, services and facilities, reinvesting more than $325 million in capital into the region. “I think we’re doing a good job of repaying the community,” he says.
Another contribution Manns sees Bronson making is using employment to ease health disparities in the communities it serves.
“When I was in graduate school, my favorite professor, Dr. Lichtenstein, said, ‘If you want to improve someone’s health status, give ’em a job.’ Bronson’s role as employer means a great deal to me. We strive to break down barriers to employment, such as: How do we take bias out of our hiring process? How do we begin to reflect the diversity of our community? To the extent that we break down those barriers, we start to improve the health status for everybody. That really drives a lot of the things that we do.”
Toward that end, Bronson created the Medical Assistant (MA) Career Pathway program, a free, on-site training program available to Bronson employees that incorporates on-the-job training, classroom time and individual coaching and support. Throughout the 6-month program, students acquire essential skills, learn medical terminology and gain other competencies. Upon completion of the program, students are eligible to sit for a nationally recognized exam to become Registered Medical Assistants. To date, more than 50 individuals have successfully completed the program.
Manns notes this is an important program because medical assistants, who work directly with providers and patients, are “really hard to find.”
“So we grow our own,” he says.
Chasing 100 percent
Looking forward, Manns says he sees opportunities for Bronson to continue to “expand our territory” and to “raise the bar.”
The hospital has the No. 1 critical care and stroke care services in the state of Michigan, according to Healthgrades, and several of its other programs, such as gastrointestinal surgery and medical treatment, pulmonary care and surgery, are ranked in the top five for the state.
“We have very, very high patient experience, but we always chase 100 percent, right? In a lot of our specialty areas, we are the first, second or third highest-performing hospital in the state. But how do we elevate even more of the specialties and subspecialties so that we’re the No. 1 one in the state?”
These are ambitious goals at a time when the health care industry faces substantial pressure due to inflation and labor shortages, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. But Manns is nothing but optimistic.
“Our financial performance has been strong,” he says, “and just keeping it strong is an opportunity as we look at the headwinds ahead.”
When Bill Manns needs to drive somewhere, he’s got a tough decision to make.
