Revealed: D CEO’s 2020 Excellence in Healthcare Award Winners

Healthcare providers in Dallas-Fort Worth have faced unprecedented challenges this year, and by all accounts, have a tough winter ahead. They’ve shown bravery, collaboration, and determination as they’ve worked to fight COVID-19 and save lives—all while running their organizations and tackling multiple other challenges.

If there was ever a group of people who deserved recognition, it’s the members of DFW’s healthcare community.

Last night, the editors of D CEO had an opportunity to just that as we honored the finalists in our 2020 Excellence in Healthcare Awards in a virtual event that was broadcast live from D’s downtown headquarters. All finalists were on hand via Zoom, as winners were revealed. Among them: Jim Hinton of Baylor Scott & White Health (Hospital Executive of the Year), John Olajide of Axxess Health (Healthcare Executive of the Year), and Dr. Kristine Guleserian of Medical City Children’s Hospital (Practitioner of the Year).



JPS was named Outstanding Healthcare System, and UT Southwestern won the award for COVID-19 Community Impact.

Additionally, Dr. Chris Crow, founder of StratiFi Health and Catalyst Health Network, was presented with a special Healthcare Trailblazer Award, and Steve Love of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council received the Lifetime Achievement Award. 

For more about all 18 winners, see below. And to see a complete list of finalists, click here. 

Outstanding Community Outreach

Children’s Health

Children’s Health created Beyond ABC, a biennial research report about the quality of life for 1.1. million children in North Texas. This report is used by nonprofits to guide informed, researched business decisions, inspire campaigns, and pivot strategies to better serve the community. 

Outstanding Service Innovation

SmartLight Analytics

SmartLight Analytics uses traditional algorithms to help self-insured employers find fraud, waste, and abuse in employee healthcare claims. The findings are reported back to the carrier to prevent the payment of the detected wasteful spending the future. This analytic technique allows the winner to reduce an employer’s healthcare spend by an average of 3 percent to 5 percent annually. 

Outstanding Provider Innovation

Access Physicians

Access Physicians is a physician-led telemedicine company that focuses on caring for patients with complex conditions. The company created telemedicine carts are designed by physicians who understand how powerful technology can be, but also how it can obstruct and frustrate if not executed well. In a time when so much of medicine has moved to remote care, the innovations have proven to be essential for many facilities that don’t have the specialists they need on the premises, in both rural and urban facilities across the country.

Outstanding Medical Research

Baylor Scott & White Research Institute

Baylor Scott & White Research Institute is finding answers and hard data to address the issues faced by the pandemic. Their work is attacking COVID-19 from all angles, leading trials for severe patient, therapies to attack the virus and symptoms of the virus. For decades, our winner has forged a research network across a health system spanning facilities, departments and teams that power nearly 2,000 active trials in 50 specialty areas each year.

Outstanding Wellness Program

Whitley Penn

Whitley Penn’s wellness program focuses on different demographics to meet the wide range of health ages while also emphasizing the reduction of healthcare costs and constantly evaluating the partnerships they use. The program includes physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social. Gym partnerships, wellness coaching, health tips, massages, group fitness classes, and a gratitude journal are just part of what makes the program so comprehensive, and a rarity in the accounting industry.

Outstanding COVID-19 Impact

UT Southwestern

Since COVID-19 began making headlines in China last December, UTSW has been monitoring the pandemic’s evolution and advising local public health authorities daily about the disease spread, sharing authoritative information with the community. UTSW hosted the Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the US coronavirus task force, and has provided startlingly accurate predictions about where the virus is headed.

Outstanding Real Estate Deal

Methodist Midlothian Medical Center

Methodist Midlothian recently opened a new 46-bed, five- story, 200,000-square-foot acute care hospital that, for the first time, will serve more than 30,000 people in their own community. The hospital will employ nearly 300 healthcare professionals and support staff during its first year of operations. The $175 million hospital facility can expand to 80 beds and includes a three-story, 45,000–square–foot medical office building on the 67–acre campus, with care for 25 specialties. 

Outstanding Collaboration

Texas Health Frisco and UT Southwestern

Texas Health and UT Southwestern have formed an innovative partnership to run a jointly-owned hospital campus that is designed to combine world-class medical expertise with the very best of what you would expect in an outstanding faith-based community hospital operator. The campus ramped up its medical and ICU capacity much sooner than originally anticipated in order to meet the community need during the pandemic and performed a variety of community outreach and education.

Outstanding Health System

JPS Health Network

JPS was honored as the top hospital in the nation out of 3,200 ranked by Washington Monthly and the Lown Institute’s list of Best Hospitals for America, which recognizes hospitals based on patient outcomes, civic leadership, and value of care. The ranking honors hospitals that use their resources wisely to provide quality care to everyone in their communities—regardless of income or insurance status. 

Healthcare Trailblazer

Dr. Chris Crow, StatiFi Health and Catalyst Health Network

Dr. Chris Crow founded StratiFi Health and Catalyst Health Network and has long been an innovator. He has been especially busy over the past year. At the onset of the pandemic, he became a highly sought-after expert on moving independent physicians to telehealth and advocating to change the way primary care is funded by payers, working to create a more efficient and sustainable system for everyone. More recently, he has launched a foundation that benefits underserved communities in Dallas, bringing together funding, community partners, and physicians. The aim is to provide care and help people build relationships with a physician where it is needed most. The pandemic has exposed the gaps in care and the need to address the social determinants of health; a consistent relationship with a physician is part of that process. Dr. Crow is helping to make that happen.  

Outstanding Healthcare Advocate

Mary Ann Contreras, JPS Health Network

Mary Ann Contreras has worked to create programs and policies that identify and assist people who are the victims of partner violence and human trafficking. She helps patients discretely seek the help they need and provides them with support and resources to regain their independence. As a co-founder of the Texas Injury Prevention Leadership Collaborative, she knows that trauma care is more than treating physical wounds; it’s breaking the cycle of violence.

Outstanding Health System Innovator

Winjie Miao, Texas Health Resources

Winjie Miao leads patient care transformation, digital integrated experience, among others.  She helped lead the Hospital2Home app, which allows patients discharged from the emergency room to communicate with ER physicians and clinicians. She also worked on a joint venture with Aetna to create to create a health plan that provides a seamless insurer-provider experience. Miao describes herself as a pragmatic pioneer. “We’re always asking how we’re going to create and use innovative products, processes, and technologies to personalize each consumer’s needs,” she says. 

Outstanding Healthcare Innovator

Henry Hermann, St. Vincent de Paul Pharmacy

Henry Hermann works with the community’s most vulnerable, providing emotional support, emergency financial assistance, and food aid. In his volunteer work, he noticed that many individuals and families in need did not have the ability to obtain necessary prescription medications. He is responsible for the creation and implementation of the first free-standing charitable pharmacy in the state of Texas, with more than 350 prescriptions available for those who couldn’t otherwise afford their medication. 

Outstanding Healthcare Practitioner

Dr. Kristine Guleserian, Medical City Children’s Hospital

Dr. Kristine Guleserian’s patients describe her as compassionate caregiver who is willing to go above and beyond to make their hospital experience as safe and comfortable as possible. She is also the nation’s first female congenital heart surgeon to lead a program in what’s largely a male-dominated field. Our winner cares for some of the most fragile hearts in North Texas and beyond. One of her greatest achievements is performing a heart transplant on the world’s smallest patient at the time, a 5-pound newborn. 

Outstanding Healthcare Volunteer

Glenn Lacy, Baylor Scott & White Health-Grapevine

Glenn Lacy has been a volunteer at a local hospital for 17 years. He has logged more than 3,400 hours as a greeter at the Labor and Delivery information desk and often goes the extra mile escorting visitors to rooms and delivering flowers along the way. But what makes him even more unique is that he began volunteering when he was 83 years old! The 100-year-old volunteer is a WW II veteran who then went on to work for more than 40 years at American Airlines. For him, giving back is a duty.

Outstanding Healthcare Executive

John Olajide, Axxess

John Olajide  grew his company from a small consulting firm in Dallas to the preeminent home healthcare technology company in North America, where he leads nearly 500 employees. The company has transformed the home health and hospice industry, providing technology to practitioners across the country. Olajide also serves as the 2020 chairman of the Dallas Regional Chamber. In that role, he has provided exceptional leadership during a difficult year and spoken out against racism, sharing his own story of perseverance as an immigrant from Nigeria. He also has been recognized by numerous organizations as is a national policy leader for home health. 

Outstanding Hospital Executive

Jim Hinton, Baylor Scott & White Health

Jim Hinton focuses on creating a unified culture, giving his health system leaders the ability to advance clinical safety, drive down costs, and focus on making care easier to navigate and more convenient for consumers. He leads a network that includes 49,000 employees, 7,500 affiliated physicians, more than1,100 access points, a health plan, research institute, and an accountable care organization. During the pandemic, he helped assemble a war room, responsible for planning and coordinating the system’s response across its 52 hospitals. Early in the crisis, the system had processed two-thirds of the state’s COVID-19 test specimens. It also processed tens of thousands of screenings during the pandemic through its app, while moving much of the care to virtual settings.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Steve Love, DFW Hospital Council

Steve Love has worked tirelessly to help Dallas hospital providers coordinate efforts around pandemic readiness in collaboration with government and business leaders, and has a unique position that provides a common platform for competing health systems to collaborate for the good of the community. During the pandemic, he convened and led regular phone calls between hospital system presidents, helping health systems coordinate and allowing Chief Medical Officers, Chief Nursing Officers and data scientists to work together to address a common struggle. He has also been a steady and powerful voice for health systems to communicate with the public and policy leaders about COVID readiness, capacity, surge plans during an unprecedented pandemic, communicating with the local and national media more than 175 times since the beginning of the pandemic. North Texas is indeed fortunate to have this Virginia native, who has been President and CEO of the DFW Hospital Council for more than 13 years. In that role, leads 90 member hospitals and promotes patient safety, quality healthcare and coordination in the delivery of healthcare in North Texas. He serves on numerous boards and has been in healthcare for more than 40 years, including work with tax exempt, investor-owned, specialty and private hospitals in operations, finance and corporate governance. One nominator described his poise and problem-solving ability this way. “He knows full well business and city rivalries could undermine healthcare quality in the region. His efforts to bring all voices together no matter the hospital or system, makes him unique and extremely valuable.”