Bryan Health President Gronewold Describes Impact of COVID-19 on Community

Taking over the top job for a health organization a few months before the coronavirus hit the U.S. would not be considered advantageous for most executives. But, give Russ Gronewold credit. He’s not like most executives.

Gronewold is the president and CEO of Bryan Health in Lincoln. He moved up to the position in early January of 2020 after serving as chief financial officer for Bryan for the previous 10 years. John Woodrich was appointed as CEO for Bryan Medical Center about a month prior to Gronewold’s advancement. And quickly into their new duties in leading the local health community, they were immersed in unfamiliar territory.

“We got started in our roles about the same time. We began with forming a 100-day plan and our listening tour which included taking some board members to a governance conference out of state to help get them educated to some things that were going on,” said Gronewold on Monday to the Executive Club at their weekly luncheon in downtown Lincoln at the Hilton Garden Inn.

“I’ll give you one guess on what was not on that agenda. COVID-19 was no-where on that agenda at that time,” exclaimed Gronewold, a native of Adams in southeast Nebraska. “But, I can tell you exactly where I was sitting listening to a presenter when all of a sudden everybody’s phones started going off and everybody looked down and saw that the first case of COVID had been reported in the U.S.”

Amidst the immediate response to the outbreak, Gronewold said they leaned toward utilizing their well-rehearsed pandemic plan only to learn all things did not immediately apply. He said they discovered two problems with their plans.

“We knew what we were supposed to do (at Bryan), but you have Omaha up there and they have the Biocontainment Unit (at UNMC) and they are were being contacted by folks all over the world. They were moving at such a pace and they weren’t able to keep the rest of us updated with all this constantly changing information, through no fault of theirs. We were being whip-sawed back and forth because things were changing so quickly.”

Gronewold described one situation where he explained to his staff a particular set of guidance instructions from Omaha with the most recent data possible at 11:00 in the morning, only to have to tell the same staff two hours later in the afternoon that the guidance had switched 180 degrees in direction.

“So I had to retract with our employees everything I had just told them,” said an exasperated Gronewold. “Trying to get on the same page with other folks in the state was difficult.”

And then he explained the biggest problem with their pandemic plans that needed to be taken into consideration.

“We assumed that we were the center of things. We’d never thought about what happens if there’s an east coast and west coast pandemic at the same time and everything that we needed for that same pandemic was used up by the time the pandemic got to us. Nobody, across the country, realized what kind of supply-chain issues we would have.”

But, that’s when the Lincoln community showed their true colors, according to Gronewold. He said the people of Star City were “just phenomenal.”

“I remember when the Pinto drove up to our front door and opened up the hatchback and there was a lady from a nail salon, that spoke very little English and she said, ‘we’ve been closed down. We have thousands of masks and gloves. Could you use them?’” Gronewold recalled. “And then we had a guy from Iron Tattoo do the same thing for us. For about three months, it was the community that got us through that, not our suppliers.”

He said during the height of the pandemic they were short on supplies “all the time.”

“But we never ran out because it was the Lincoln community that did what it did and it shows us what a special place this,” he said. “I could tell you story after story. We somehow found everything we needed that took us through that first year of the pandemic.”

So much for the first wave. But, Gronewold said he received some valuable information from his brother, who is a general in the National Guard. He said he asked his brother for some advice in dealing with pandemic-type adversity back in May of 2020.

“He told me it’s not the 1st wave, that’s going to get ‘ya. It’s the 2nd, 3rd and 4th wave that are going to get ‘ya and nobody at that time was even talking about anything but the 1st wave,” recalled Gronewold, who received his undergraduate degree from Midlands University in Fremont and his graduate degree in Omaha from UNO. “And sure enough it was the 2nd wave that was just brutal for all of us this last winter. I hope that is something we never have to go through again.”

Despite hoping for the best for the Lincoln area, the following delta variant has not allowed the community to let their guard down. It has made its impact on the community.

“All of a sudden, nobody predicted Delta and it has been just nasty. It’s just been a terrible situation,” he said. “We are 3 ? months into dealing with the delta wave at Bryan and that wave was supposed to last just 8 weeks. And it has been just steady. Where we’re at today is 70 patients hospitalized that we’re treating actively for COVID and all but one is the Delta COVID.”?