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HomeHealthHealth board hires Mark Rogers as new Wahzhazhe Health Center CEO

Health board hires Mark Rogers as new Wahzhazhe Health Center CEO

Rogers has more than 25 years of experience in hospital administration with the most recent at the Absentee Shawnee Tribal Health Authority

The WahZhaZhe Health Center has hired a new Chief Executive Officer, this time a man with nine years of experience leading the Absentee Shawnee Tribal Health Authority and stints as the administrator of six different hospitals in Oklahoma before that.

The announcement that the Si-Si A-Pe-Txa Board (Health Authority Board) had hired Mark E. Rogers, came two days after he began work on July 13.

Rogers, who is Cherokee, is taking over the clinic after it has had a rocky year but is poised for unprecedented growth with a new clinic planned for Main Street in Pawhuska that will be five times the size of the existing clinic.

“It is a great privilege to be here working with the Osage Nation Health Services,” Rogers said in a prepared release. “The strategic vision of the Osage Nation, the Health Board, and the Health Leadership Team all working together to take the Tribe’s Health Services to new heights, was an opportunity I am humbled, and honored, to be a part of.”

At Absentee Shawnee, Rogers appears to have been well-liked. He was well-praised by colleagues when the tribe announced his departure, and one employee, a therapist named Jon Lee Soap Jr. was particularly effusive: “See you later to the best employee ever hired by the Absentee Shawnee Tribe.”

In June, the Absentee announced the expansion of its Little Axe Clinic, and it has developed two mobile dental and vaccine clinics that go to patients rather than have patients travel for medical care. The tribe compacted its healthcare system in the early 1990s, making it one of the first to do so.

Rogers has been the CEO of the Absentee Shawnee health system since 2014. According to his resume, the AST clinics increased revenue and assets from $27 million to $107 million under his leadership and reduced workforce turnover from 300 percent to less than 2.5 percent. During that time span, AST also had no lawsuits, Equal Employment Opportunity or labor law complaints, and failed no surveys from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

Before AST, Rogers was CEO at Oklahoma City’s Kindred Hospitals, which he helped stabilize after the two hospitals were damaged by an EF-5 tornado. At Kindred, he also increased revenue and was noted for his help retaining special providers, his resume said.

Between 2002 and 2012, he was CEO at the 49-bed Pushmataha County Hospital. He came in to that job as the hospital was facing closure and implemented a turnaround plan that restored the hospital to profitability within a year – and earned it a clean audit, his resume says.

He has also worked for Assiniboine, Sioux and Choctaw nations as well as with Alaskan Natives on Kodiak Island.

Rogers is currently getting a doctorate in healthcare administration and is an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Public Health. He was part of a team that attended a forum at Harvard University’s School of Public Health to revise a national healthcare program – that later became the Affordable Care Act. He has also garnered several awards for his work with elders and veterans as well as for the AST’s response during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He has a master’s level certificate in healthcare administration from the U.S. Air Force, in which he has served for 37 years. A decorated Gulf War veteran, he is currently a lieutenant colonel in the Oklahoma National Guard as the senior health services administrator with the 137th Special Operations Wing, Special Operations Medical Group. He is from southeast Oklahoma, is married, and has three children and three grandchildren.

Author

  • Louise Red Corn

    Title: Freelance Author
    Twitter: @louiseredcorn
    Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

    Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

    After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

    When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

    In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

    Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

    Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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Louise Red Corn
Louise Red Cornhttps://osagenews.org
Title: Freelance Author
Twitter: @louiseredcorn
Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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