Douglas Smith Named Chief Operating Officer at Martin's Point

PORTLAND, Maine - Wm. Douglas Smith, who has more than 20 years of management experience in the healthcare environment, has been named chief operating officer at Martin's Point Health Care, Maine's largest primary care physician practice.

At Martin's Point, the scope of responsibility for the chief operating officer includes the three Martin's Point Health Care divisions (Medical Group Practices, Plan Services and Informatics) as well as additional operations oversight. Smith will report to Dr. David Howes, M.D., president and chief medical officer, who will continue to oversee the organization as a whole, focusing on strategic planning, public affairs and the development of new healthcare model delivery systems.

"As our organization has grown in complexity, the enormity of the management responsibilities has grown with it, necessitating the addition of senior staff with new skills and experiences," said Dr. Howes. "So it is time to deepen our management. The most crucial benefit of Doug Smith's experience is that I can now effectively meet the unprecedented healthcare industry demands required of the president of what has become one of the largest employers in our area." Martin's Point has grown to more than 300 employees and 54,000 patients, and two of its four locations are newly built and expanded facilities.

"Doug Smith is an experienced, accomplished, highly educated professional with outstanding expertise in health care and information systems," Howes said. "We are pleased that he is joining us and confident that he will strengthen our collective pursuit of operational excellence." Smith, who will begin his tenure at Martin's Point in early September, will relocate his family to Maine from their home in Nashville, Tenn.

Smith served as chief information officer and vice president of ClinTrials, a publicly-traded multinational clinical pharmaceutical research organization. He also served as a manager of microcomputer technologies for Deloitte & Touche, overseeing a team of analysts and developers responsible for evaluating, purchasing and supporting microcomputer technologies for 16,000 employees in 110 offices across the U.S. Smith's career also includes management as a director in HealthAmerica, a HMO management company with more than 35 HMOs and 1 million members, as a medical center administrator and budget director at Kaiser-Permanente and as a senior management consultant at Ernest and Whinney.

For the past eight years, Smith has operated W.D. Smith and Associates in Nashville, serving as a management consultant to several prominent, high-growth companies in the healthcare business environment. In recent years he has worked with provider sponsored and venture capital backed managed care organizations and Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations on projects ranging from corporate and information systems strategic planning, system selection corporate reorganizations, data warehouse design and implementation to working as an acting CIO.

Smith is a 1976 graduate of Saint Michaels College in Winooski, Vt., where he graduated cum laude with a degree in psychology and a minor in biology. While completing his undergraduate studies, he also served as an EMT and a captain of a 29-member fire and rescue department. Smith received a Master's of Health Administration from Duke University in Durham, N.C., in 1979 with a concentration in planning and information management.

Smith is a member and a guest speaker for the American Association of Health Plans (AAHP) and has served as a member of corporate advisory councils for product development for a number of major corporations, including Compaq, Toshiba, Symantec and Microsoft. He also served as the representative for Vanderbilt University Health Plan on the Tennessee Governor's Roundtable on Medical Communications Technology.

Established in 1981, Martin's Point is a not-for-profit health care provider with facilities in Portland, Brunswick, and Windham, Maine, and Portsmouth, N.H. The largest primary care practice in Maine, Martin's Point has a staff of more than 300 health care professionals and serves 54,000 patients - including military retirees and dependents of active military personnel - under all major health plans. Martin's Point serves patients in the areas of family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, radiology, cardiology, and mammography, as well as other fields.

In addition, Martin's Point is known for its innovative approach to health care. Unique to Martin's Point is its online communication program called Patient's Personal Points(TM), which allows patients to communicate via a secure server with their doctors to schedule appointments, ask medical questions and obtain prescription renewals. The program won a national technology award from the Healthcare Innovations in Technology Systems (HITS) Partnership in Technology national awards program. For additional information on Martin's Point Health Care, visit online at www.martinspoint.org.

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