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A Man with a Mission
The
tiny, blue-collar town of Stroudsburg, Pa., was a child’s friend.
With a lawnmower, Dan Rahn, his big brother, Ned, and their friends transformed an empty neighborhood lot into a baseball field. The long, dark winter turned the pond into an ice-skating rink. The brothers cut a path through the woods, even built a bridge over the creek, so they could walk to school in just five minutes. They played ping-pong and shuffleboard in the public playground, softball and baseball on the Little League field. They swam in the town pool.
It was life: perfect in some regards and not so perfect in others.
Their parents, Cherry and Ed, loved their boys and their youngest, Jenny, and always wanted more for them than the high school education they received. Ed was an electrician who, like so many of his peers, enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was later recalled during the Korean conflict. He’d just come home from his second war and was busy painting his family’s new house when he fell through the rungs of a ladder, crushing his heels and landing in a wheelchair where he was told he would stay.
“We lived on the charity of the church and the Veterans of Foreign Wars for almost a year, and then he was able to get up and get going again,” Dan Rahn says. Their father would experience periodic health problems for the rest of his life. “My mother went back to work during those periods of time. She held the family together.”
The
brothers held each other together as well. “I think my brother and
I grew up at a young age because when you are in difficult
circumstances, you either triumph or you cave. We decided we
weren’t going to cave,” says the now 51-year-old husband,
father, physician and seventh president of the Medical College of
Georgia.
Dr. Rahn had traveled no farther than New York City and the New Jersey shore until, at age 16, the naturally athletic teen went to a ski camp on a glacier in the northern Rocky Mountains. “I realized there was a big world out there; it absolutely changed my life.” His intelligence and talent transported him from Stroudsburg to Yale University, where he got a music scholarship.
It was turbulent 1968 when he moved from small-town U.S.A. to an international student body. Brother Ned dropped him off at school and the affable Dr. Rahn decided to start mingling. “I saw this guy reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I said, ‘Hi. I’m Dan Rahn,’ and he said, ‘So what?’” Thus began life at Yale…but within a month, he had begun to thrive in the environment, once again augmenting his natural abilities with hard work.
Physics seemed a likely major for him; he enjoyed causation, science and solvable problems. “I’d had this struggle for structure in my life. As a young kid, I felt I was in a situation that couldn’t be managed no matter how hard I worked at it. I think I was attracted to areas I could manage.”
By his junior year, he was considering a profession that constantly seeks answers to pretty tough questions. As was the case when he started college, he had no idea what medical school would entail. But he believed that with hard work, he could do it.
Still, something about Stroudsburg kept calling him home. Her name was Lana Marie Joyce.
“Lana
is a very genuine person, a straightforward person yet shy,” says
the man who clearly loves her. She and Dr. Rahn married in summer
1972. She was a research assistant at Yale, so he stayed there for
medical school.
This man who seems the picture of confidence says he is comfortable with himself today, but that he hasn’t always been. There were times as a medical student, a resident, chief resident in internal medicine and finally as a rheumatology fellow at Yale that he looked around and wondered how he got there.
“There have been times when I felt like an imposter…that feeling that you alone have slipped through the usually rigorous screening processes and now find yourself in a situation for which you are totally unprepared. Everybody else deserves to be there and you don’t. The time that it really hits you is when you have patient-care responsibilities and you realize that no amount of hard work is necessarily going to translate into a good outcome.”
He struggled as a young man to come to terms with those occasional, inevitable bad outcomes. “That was hard,” he says. “That was hard.”
But his profession also offered sweet inspiration. His mentors included Dr. Allen C. Steere, a rheumatologist who discovered Lyme disease, and Dr. John A. Hardin, a rheumatologist and MCG School of Medicine alumnus who joined the Yale faculty during Dr. Rahn’s residency. Their pioneering studies of the immune system caught his fascination and helped Dr. Rahn settle on his future.
After his rheumatology fellowship, Dr. Rahn spent eight years in private practice in Guilford, Conn. “Guilford is a historic town with about 20,000 people. I took care of every single person in my neighborhood. I took care of the Episcopal priest, the minister of the Congregational church, the liquor store owner and the mayor. I made house calls. I sat at the bedside with elderly spouses and children while their loved ones died at home,” he says.
He is grateful for those years, certain they made him a better doctor and man. But the schedule was grueling and he missed the stimulation of research. He returned to Yale in 1988, gaining his first experiences as a principal investigator, speaker, writer and administrator directing the faculty practice for the 200-member Department of Medicine. He helped build a management team and business structure with consistent performance expectations for all. “We created a structure that was understandable and could be applied uniformly. It kind of drove itself, once we implemented it.”
Dr. Rahn’s career was in high gear. With children Jason, Rebecca and Zachary rounding out the family, the Rahns seemed settled in for the long haul. Then, Dr. Hardin—the MCG
graduate who was now Yale’s chief of rheumatology and Dr. Rahn’s boss—was offered a position as chairman of the MCG Department of Medicine and wanted Dr. Rahn as his vice chairman. “Without skipping a beat, I said, ‘John, I love you dearly. Go if you must. But that’s really not in my life plan.’”
But his boss persisted and when Dr. Rahn came to MCG for a daylong visit, his life plan changed. “I was really struck by the mission of the institution, its clinical and educational heritage, its importance and its potential.”
In 1991, Dr. Rahn and his family came to the Medical College of Georgia.
He has served many roles at Georgia’s health sciences university: vice chairman, program director for the Internal Medicine Residency Training Program, chief of the Section of General Internal Medicine, director of the Center for Healthcare Improvement and vice dean for clinical activities for the School of Medicine.
In 1999, he was named medical director for the university’s clinical system and became senior vice president for medical affairs and chief medical officer for MCG Health, Inc. last July when the not-for-profit corporation took over management of the clinical system.
As the clinical operation was changing management hands, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia was announcing search committees to help identify a successor for retiring President Francis J. Tedesco. The first call Dr. Rahn got from the search firm said he was on a long list of candidates; it was when he learned he was among the five finalists that he began to realize the job could be his. His first thoughts were of his family: Would this mean even less time with them? “We talked it through and decided if called, we would do it.”
March 5, 2001, Ned Rahn, a Philadelphia lawyer, called to wish his brother a happy birthday. Two days later, the brother he describes as intellectual, curious, hard-working and caring was named president. “I have not been surprised by anything [Dan’s] accomplished, quite frankly,” Mr. Rahn says. “It’s a great honor, but nothing has been handed to him; he has worked for it.”
Dr. Rahn’s mentor, Dr. Steere, echoes the sentiment: “Dan was clearly a leader. It makes perfect sense to me that this has happened.”
In the final weeks before assuming the presidency, Dr. Rahn was preparing for this role as he has for all his others: by listening, learning and working. He does not intend to do the job alone, but as part of a team that empowers the faculty and staff.
“I think the role of senior leadership is to preside over the development of the strategic plan, prioritize, match resources to those strategies, articulate the mission and clear the barriers,” he says. “I said to alumni [recently], ‘I think the faculty and staff are the ones who do the work. They are the ones who are going to accomplish the missions.’ The LCME saw that,” he says of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education which recently awarded full accreditation to the School of Medicine.
“They saw the confidence that the core missions are going to be accomplished uninterruptedly, that we will get the job done. We should take that to heart. During the time of an interim dean, interim president, interim almost everything, the LCME came in and said, ‘The medical education program is fine.’”
Ensuring the continued quality of MCG’s educational programs is a high priority. As president, he will appoint deans of Allied Health Sciences, Dentistry, Medicine and Nursing, and within all five schools are numerous other key positions to fill. “I believe we must be patient and hold out for excellence,” he says. “If you look around the country, this is a great place to be coming.” He also wants to ensure that MCG’s student body closely reflects the diversity of the state of Georgia.
Increased research activity is on the agenda as well. “It’s a wonderfully exciting time; the time from discovery to implementation is getting progressively shorter,” he says. The plan for building research is already is in place, developed largely by Dr. Matthew J. Kluger, vice president for research, and the Biomedical Research Council. “The plan links to centers of excellence planned on the clinical side—such as neurosciences—and provides the opportunity to recruit physician-investigators, which is our greatest shortage,” he says.
In the area of patient care, he believes the clinical system needed the operating flexibility it gained July 1 to support education and research at the university. And, while it’s no longer the job of the president to direct the clinical system, it is his job to ensure that the intended purpose is accomplished. “We need to consolidate and stabilize the structural transformation that has occurred,” Dr. Rahn says. “We need to solidify relationships between the health system, the Physicians Practice Group and the campus.”
He says MCG also needs to solidify its role in the Georgia Cancer Initiative, designed to strengthen cancer prevention, detection, treatment and research in Georgia. The initiative includes the designation of three cancer centers. “This is clearly an extraordinary opportunity. It is clear that a major order of business is to preside over the academic component of the cancer initiative in Augusta and Georgia. We need to build collaborative research with the University of Georgia and, certainly in the context of cancer, with Emory University as well,” he says.
Key to the agenda is the continued support of the alumni. “It will help us enormously if the alumni understand, support and feel good about the vision for the future of MCG, because they are strategically placed all over the state. They exert influence wherever they are. They can help us in their own communities by representing MCG and its values so we can continue to recruit the highest-caliber students. They can help us financially as well. The state is never going to send enough financial support. They also can help us by communicating if they think we are not doing the right thing.
“Am I going to make mistakes? Yes. Do I have the knowledge to do everything in this job? No. Can I hold myself accountable? Yes. I can accept responsibility for a decision, but I want the decision to be a group decision,” Dr. Rahn says. And once a decision is made, he wants to move forward. “That’s probably when I’m the toughest. My patience with myself is limited when I don’t, my patience with others is limited when they don’t.”
He wants to stay well-grounded through the work ahead, ever mindful of his family, his religion and the fact that he couldn’t and wouldn’t do the work alone. He hopes that continuing patient care—if only for one afternoon a week—and the medical mission work that has taken him across the world will help keep him steadfast as well.
“I want the people who work here to be engaged in meaningful work and have a high level of professional and personal satisfaction out of what they put into their efforts for MCG. I want this institution to be able to accomplish its purposes for the state of Georgia which are, at a very basic level, to improve the health of the people of Georgia.”
Toni Baker
MCG Today, Fall 2001