Reflecting on 22 Years of Service at Denver Health

Connie Savor Price, MD, MBA, is the outgoing Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of Denver Health. She served in this role for 10 years but spent more than two decades at Denver Health.

Denver Health: How did you initially come to Denver Health?

Connie Price: I happened to meet Mike Wilson, MD, Denver Health’s chair of pathology and laboratory medicine, at a national conference where I was presenting research. He was part of the search process and persuaded me to come out for an interview for the first Department of Medicine-based infectious diseases physician and health care epidemiologist. I joined Denver Health in July 2002, and soon after was named the first Chief of Infectious Diseases. I love building things, so it was a dream job for me. I had the opportunity to build the two inpatient infectious diseases services, a clinic, an IV antibiotic program, a world-class infection prevention program, and a research program that focused on common infectious diseases challenges.?

Denver Health: Let’s walk further back in time. How did you end up specializing in infectious diseases?

Connie Price: I did my residency in internal medicine at Northwestern University - The Feinberg School of Medicine , where I also had attended medical school. It was the mid-1990’s and the height of the AIDS epidemic. I was taking care of so many young patients dying of unusual infections, rare cancers, or simply failure to thrive because their immune systems were severely compromised by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). From an intellectual standpoint, I was fascinated by the medical complexity of these patients and motivated to understand the reason behind their illnesses. From a personal standpoint, I felt very connected to these patients because I saw them so often in the hospital. Losing patients to this new illness was traumatic, and perhaps my way of coping was trying to understand the illness better. So, after completing my internal medicine residency, I pursued subspecialty training in infectious diseases.

I landed a fellowship at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. My laboratory mentor was Tony Fauci, MD, who, at that time, was director of the NIAID and the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. I had a few projects:?looking for anti-HIV properties of compounds harvested from Samoan tree bark, studying the interaction of HIV virus and influenza co-infection, and trying to find out where in the body the AIDS virus was hiding out. Highly active anti-HIV drugs had just come on the market to treat AIDS and were very successful, but if patients stopped using the drugs, the infection would reappear. The NIH was an amazing place to be a physician and scientist because you could ask the question ‘why?’ and have every resource made immediately available in an attempt to answer it.

Denver Health: Your career has evolved since then. How did that experience take you to Denver Health?

Connie Price: Finding the answers through laboratory research would take many more years, and I found myself missing patient care. It was now the year 2000, and the Institute of Medicine had just released a report entitled “To Err is Human,” which launched the patient safety movement in health care. I was offered an opportunity to return to Chicago to work on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant to do research on the detection and prevention of medical errors in health care, eventually focusing on health care associated infections. The output of our work produced methods that inform how we track, analyze and prevent medical errors today.? I loved that this type of work allowed me to do research but also stay close to patient care. During that research, I also became intrigued with the emerging problem of antimicrobial resistance that led me to pursue a second fellowship in medical microbiology at Northwestern. I was presenting my research from my fellowship project when I ran into Dr. Wilson about the Denver Health opportunity!

Denver Health: We realize that having spent 22 years at Denver Health it might be hard to identify some of your proudest accomplishments. But can you highlight a few things?

Connie Price: Denver Health gave me the chance to grow as an academic physician, which has made me a much better leader and CMO. Teaching and mentoring others helped me understand what clinicians need to succeed, and my research experience taught me how to ask the right questions and dig into data to solve problems. Staying connected to clinical work—both in general and specialty medicine—kept me grounded and in touch with the challenges my colleagues face every day. I loved being able to connect a problem I saw in practice to research opportunities and then use what we learned to help others through talks and publications. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to give more than 300 talks and publish over 100 papers. It’s been amazing to share Denver Health’s work with the world—that’s so core to our mission.

I’m also very proud of the work we’ve done in infectious diseases and disaster response. My time working in Toronto during the SARS epidemic in 2004 sparked my interest in disaster medicine, which opened the door to some incredible opportunities. For example, I was invited by Ministry of Health Saudi Arabia to investigate the source of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak. Those experiences eventually helped me lead Denver Health to secure its designation as one of the original Regional Emerging Special Pathogens Treatment Centers (RESPTC) and Regional Disaster Health Response System (RDHRS) through the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response . These programs have maintained our place at the forefront of disaster preparedness, and it feels good to be part of that legacy.

I have been CMO during some tumultuous times, and I’m proud of how I’ve navigated through them.? I value the relationships built with our medical staff and the ways we have worked together to improve the organization. Like changing the medical staff model to an elected representative structure and establishing an Advanced Practice Provider Council. I also established the departmental Clinical Operations Leadership Teams to ensure department chairs were involved in all budgeting and operational decisions. Having clinical leaders oversee their teams has led to real improvements in how we care for our patients. And, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it was handy to have a background in infectious diseases, the skills I really needed to pull from were leadership, people, and crisis management skills.

Another big win was creating the Denver Health Office of Research and Office of Education. We brought in our first chief research officer and chief education officer, which really elevated the way we do research and teaching.

And finally, I have loved representing Denver Health to the public. Whether it was testifying before the United States Congress or the State of Colorado legislature, working with the media to educate and reassure the community, or sharing our work on a national and international stage, it has been an honor to tell Denver Health’s story.

Denver Health: So what now?

Connie Price: I will continue my faculty role as a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and remain active in my research pursuits. Aside from that, I intend to read, recharge and take time to be outdoors which I love. I actually want to build a set of skis.

Denver Health: How are you going to do that?

Connie Price: No idea. I’ll let you know when I build them.

Denver Health: Words to live by?

Connie Price: Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “The time is always right to do what is right.” This has always been my compass as CMO of Denver Health. Many times, I had to make hard decisions that weren’t always popular. This required me to stay grounded in doing what was best for the organization. It also required bravery, which I learned is an essential part of leadership.

I hope that’s how I’ll be remembered at Denver Health…as someone who was grounded in what I believed to be right and fair and in the best interests of the Denver Health and our patients.

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