‘More women die of cardiovascular disease than all the cancers combined, but we still don’t have research to rely on for treatment,’ says Sharp CEO Donna Mills. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Sharp CEO Donna Mills has spent her career embracing, understanding – and benefiting — from change. She honed her business acumen with the emergence of HMOs, helped grow a 10-physician group to nearly seven times that size and then integrated the group into Sharp Rees-Stealy — which recruited her to the parent company.

At Sharp, the energetic and attractive Mills has set a profoundly positive and candid tone in keeping with her own personal style.

She arrives for a late spring interview shaking rain out of her auburn hair and looks for an empty office in which to meet. Settling into a chair at a small table, she parks her purse and looks out the window at a view of Kearny Mesa, mentioning that the staff member whose office we’ve appropriated deserves a good view. Her smile lights the room.

She laughs at the idea that she doesn’t present with the formality of most CEOs.

“I’ve got to be who I am — I come with my life’s experiences,” Mills says. “We are in the business of taking care of people and you don’t get far by being structured and closed.”

As she walks through the halls, Sharp employees greet her with warm smiles. If Mills doesn’t already know their names, she learns them. She takes the time to meet a baby — and her parents — who have been waving at her during a photo session.

One of Mills’s key goals has been making sure patients have a positive experience with Sharp — especially women, who have been left behind by medicine in the past.

“Women have a stronger voice in our industry now — you see more research involving women than ever before,” Mills says, noting the emerging recognition that women’s heart attacks are very different from men’s. “More women die of cardiovascular disease than all the cancers combined, but we still don’t have research to rely on for treatment.”

“In every diagnosis, women are different. Illnesses and problems present differently, we react to drugs differently, we have different problems than men do from the same conditions, yet we are just starting to get research on women’s health,” she says. “As a gender, we are becoming an emerging force.”

Sharp pioneered women’s health care in San Diego with the Mary Birch Hospital for Women, founded 10 years ago primarily for obstetrics, but now offering a wide range of diagnostic care and treatment. Mary Birch is one of 17 women’s hospitals in the nation.

About 35 percent of Sharp’s doctors are women, and women fill 60 percent of the primary care physician slots.

Now Mills is guiding Sharp through the tangles of the next changes in medical services as costs move health care from an employee-paid benefit to an individually financed system that provokes people to manage their own care.

“That change is pushing us to be more transparent and more accessible in what we do because our patients are asking: ‘If I’m paying for this, what am I getting?’” Mills says. “It’s always been a balancing act — how can we give the best product and the best care for a reasonable amount of money — but now our patients need to be able to access their information quickly and to be able to understand it. This change is forcing us to get our data more accessible and available. I get to lead that!”

Mills’ enthusiasm for leadership is contagious. People who work with the 63-year-old — whether at Sharp Rees-Stealy or on the two nonprofits where she is a board member — say that her style involves genuine team-building and a positive approach.

“Donna is a visionary,” says Diane Pearson, who serves with Mills on the board of the YWCA of San Diego County. “She has the ability to see the dots and connect them.” Pearson was the board president when Mills joined in 2003 and says she’s enjoyed watching Mills work — very hard, she notes.

“Donna is a great team player and she understands the value of the team and the value of the vision,” Pearson says. “I think her ability to stay focused on the direction of the entire organization makes her incredibly valuable.”

An Air Force brat, Mills was born in England and grew up in Panama, Washington, Kansas and New York, among other places. After graduating from the University of Arizona with thoughts toward teaching, she came to San Diego in 1969.

Mills first began to pay attention to the health care industry through tragedy. Her first husband, a police officer, became ill with leukemia and died when they were both 30. As a sort of memorial, she attended the police academy, intending to become an officer.

“I found I didn’t like the work — I didn’t want to be a police officer,” she says. “A friend said if you can be a cop, you can collect hospital bills.”

She began working for American Medical International and, in about a year, became the head of the business department at Center City Hospital. A year later she moved over to El Cajon Valley Hospital, where she remained for two years until she was hired by UCSD Medical Center to run the family practice department.

“After a few years, we began hearing about this thing called an HMO and we started to look at how can we thrive as providers and offer terrific prognosis and treatment to our patients,” Mills says.

In 1987, seven years after she began working at UCSD, she was invited to interview with Mission Park Medical Group in Oceanside, which decided it needed to fit into the growing scheme of HMOs.

“It was a chance to get them started on professional management and to help them become an organization that better served HMO patients,” Mills says. “At the time, a lot of seniors were going into HMOs. It was a real opportunity for growth.”

Mills says she was competing for the position against the landscaper brother of one of the group’s doctors, and she had the now unheard-of experience of being asked during her interview if she planned to have children.

Despite that, she took the job, and in four years helped grow the medical group to 75 physicians, a one-stop shop for HMO patients.

In 1993, she helped integrate Mission Park in Oceanside into the Sharp family of medical centers. She now balances her work as the CEO/administrator of both Sharp Mission Park and Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Centers.

Dr. Louis Hogrefe joined Mission Park a year after Mills and was immediately impressed by her effectiveness.

“Donna is energetic and on the ball, knowledgeable about the health care industry and is an incredibly positive force on her environment,” says Hogrefe, now the president of Mission Park. “She’s been able to deal with the tremendous amount of change in the industry and she’s not afraid to find new ways to deal with the challenges.”

And, he says, Mills is gracious and positive in the toughest situations. “When you’re leading a bunch of physicians who can be bullheaded and resistant to change, she can handle those situations well and with directness,” he says.

Hogrefe says Mills’s leadership style is as unstructured and positive as her personal style. “She makes sure she has good people around and she listens to them to make the best decision possible,” he says. “She’s very open to input from others.”

“There’s a saying that a true leader makes everyone think it was their own idea,” adds Hogrefe. “When Donna is done, she wants to be able to say this organization was made better because of her work and it’s in good standing. She doesn’t need it carved on her tombstone — she knows it.”

Among her more recent accomplishments, Mills has been the driving force for moving ahead with electronic medical records, which promise to give patients and doctors faster and more reliable access to patient information, Hogrefe says.

“It’s a very visible accomplishment,” Hogrefe says. “And she takes some credit but she doesn’t go out and flag wave for it.”

Other medical systems have noticed her accomplishments. Recruiters regularly approach Mills with lucrative offers she just as regularly turns down.

“I have had an incredible career and Sharp has been a very important part of it,” Mills says. “I have the challenge I need here — I wouldn’t work anywhere else.”

While Mills enthusiastically pushes Sharp toward the future of health care, she makes no secret of her dreams of retiring to Hawaii in a few years.