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When the COVID-19 vaccine first became available in December 2020, Krista Curell was working in the University of Chicago Medicine vaccine clinic on the first day it opened. As a licensed nurse, Curell was able to provide injections for the most vulnerable patients selected for vaccines.
After administering the vaccine to a woman in her nineties, Curell was asked by the patient to look at her phone’s calendar and determine when the patient would be able to visit her grandchild. They plotted out the date together, and the woman left with the knowledge that after nearly a year of isolation, she’d be able to meet her grandchild.
“It was the most challenging time for us, and certainly for the healthcare industry at large,” Curell remembers. “But for a leader, it was the time to refine your leadership and understand what it means to be committed to a community.”
The executive vice president and chief operating officer has spent over twenty-four years with UChicago Medicine, beginning in risk management and patient safety. Since that time, Curell has expanded her responsibilities and oversight to include compliance, business continuity and human resources, eventually leading the organization’s response to crisis events like the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, the leader’s first challenge on behalf of the emergency management business continuity team—which she helped establish—was the possible intake of patients from Africa who had contracted Ebola in 2014.
“That was an opportunity to see this team really function incredibly well in a time of crisis,” Curell explains. “We set up a hospital incident command system and selected a group of leaders to take over operational leadership of the hospital, always assessing the impact of the external or internal crisis against normal operations and ensuring we could maintain that business continuity.”
That team was well-established by the time the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Curell’s leadership during that time was exemplary, which would later lead to a promotion to EVP and then COO for the health system. The EVP says the arrival of Thomas Jackiewicz as UChicago Medicine’s new leader in the middle of the pandemic could have caused a great deal of turmoil, but it was the exact opposite. The two developed a strong working relationship, and she supported President Jackiewicz’s bold expansion plan.
Jackiewicz wanted to double the health system’s revenue from $2.5 billion to $5 billion, a target that managed to be achieved even amid the pandemic. Curell’s role evolved in tandem with that growth, as she took on broader operational responsibilities. She was instrumental in integrating new sites and partnerships, like The Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s south suburbs, a joint venture with Adventist Hospital in the northwest suburbs, and a new micro hospital and multispecialty facility in Crown Point, Indiana.
“The lion’s share of the credit goes to [Jackiewicz], our strategic team, and our faculty, because they’re really the ones who fostered and established the relationships we needed to move into these additional spaces and ensure that we did so in a nondisruptive way,” Curell says. “We didn’t want to disrupt the local healthcare ecosystem; we wanted to be an additive partner, providing complex care that may be lacking or that patients don’t have enough access to.”
But Curell’s biggest accomplishment could be ahead of her. The project that may be the capstone of her tenure is underway, as UChicago Medicine builds a 575,000-square-foot facility dedicated to cancer care and research. When it opens in 2027 as the AbbVie Foundation Cancer Pavilion, the state-of-the-art facility will transform the cancer patient journey by integrating physical, emotional, and supportive care in a world-class environment.
The Cancer Pavilion will be the first freestanding facility of its kind in Illinois dedicated solely to reshaping cancer care through integrated research, clinical treatment, and personalized patient care.
The project will help address significant health disparities on Chicago’s South Side, where cancer is the second leading cause of death. The Cancer Pavilion will unify more than two hundred leading cancer experts currently spread across multiple buildings on UChicago campuses.
“The day you’re diagnosed with cancer is probably the worst day of your life,” Curell says. “We want to transform the patient journey and not just provide infusion or tumor removal. We are going to take care of you and provide all the support you need to work through this incredibly challenging time.”
Curell’s two main strategic focuses in the short term will be the Cancer Pavilion and UChicago Medicine’s continued strategic growth plans. The EVP is the president of the Crown Point micro-hospital, and she looks forward to continuing to work with local communities, recruiting physicians and finding talent who want to live where they work.
When Curell talks about wanting to find dedicated physicians, consider how she and her husband, a UChicago Medicine anesthesiologist, spent their 2020 New Year’s Eve.
“My husband vaccinated me, I vaccinated him, and we spent the night vaccinating everyone else,” Curell says with a smile.
Those are the healthcare leaders we need.
