Latino takes health care to new levels

South Sacramento Kaiser official looks back on varied career,
By Anna Tong, The Sacramento Bee, Feb. 1, 2010

Max Villalobos has never taken care of a patient, yet a big part of Kaiser Permanente's South Sacramento Medical Center bears his mark.

Bespectacled and balding, he's the hospital's Mr. Fix-it in a suit. He walks the halls holding doors for patients and asking staff about their families. He'll even stop to pick up a stray bit of trash from the floor.

Villalobos has been the highest-ranking non-physician at Kaiser's south Sacramento hospital for just four years and already has won acclaim for the hospital's advances.

And, as health care executives go, he's probably traveled further than most to get to this point in his career.

Villalobos is one of 11 children in an immigrant family, and he lived through an impoverished childhood in Chihuahua, Mexico, and then in Los Angeles. His father was a day laborer and, later, a butcher.

It took Villalobos 13 years – studying part time and working full time – to finish his education. He's the only one of his siblings to finish college; he also earned a master's degree in health care administration from the University of Southern California.

People who have watched his rise say Villalobos understands his hospital's diverse patient population. The Kaiser center is in an area with one of the region's richest mixes of ethnic cultures and languages.

Under his leadership, Kaiser South Sacramento became the first Kaiser hospital to fully implement a new electronic medical records system and the first to open a Level II trauma center. And Villalobos is overseeing a $300 million expansion.

But what really sets Villalobos apart, observers said, is his commitment to improving the patient experience.

"When we talk about improving patient care, it's not just the medical care," Villalobos said. "Can they find where to park? Are they able to figure out where to go? I try to focus on the little things as well as the big things."

Several years ago, he began a campaign to make all of Kaiser South Sacramento's signs bilingual.

"Imagine you're a Latino patient who's coming into the hospital and not doing well, and you need to find where you're going," he said.

In the Sacramento region, nearly 60 percent of the insured Latino population are Kaiser Permanente members.

Bilingual signs were a simple idea but a huge undertaking. It took three years to replace thousands of signs at the 1 million-square-foot hospital.

Villalobos is no stranger to hard work.

His younger sister, Patricia Appleby, says Villalobos was always serious about work and school. She recalled that his high school job was at a McDonald's, where in 1976 he received $2.15 per hour. As a teenager, he was promoted to supervisor, and helped Patricia get a job.

"When he got me the job at McDonald's, he would say, 'Don't stand around, you need to sweep or mop if you have free time,' " she said.

In 1996, Kaiser Permanente recruited him to be director of sourcing and logistics, and he began working his way up.

Even as a senior vice president, no task seems beneath Villalobos. He's been known to personally mediate confrontations between patients and staff.

If he has a spare minute, he doesn't sit in his office. Instead, he is out doing "rounds," which for this non-doctor means walking around the hospital, checking on staff and patients.

When he was in charge of implementing the hospital's electronic health records pilot program, he spent countless hours on such rounds.

"I wore out three pairs of shoes walking around then," he said.

The electronic medical records program is now so successful that every Kaiser hospital is using it or converting to it. In the process, Kaiser has become the second-largest health care system to use electronic medical records, after the Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals.

It hasn't been easy, though. Some staffers said they just couldn't ever get used to computers. Some cried, and a few even quit over the conversion.

One of those who found it difficult to convert was Nazanin Hassan, a nurse who said Villalobos visited her every day during the process.

"Now I don't think I could go without the electronic system," she said, recalling that because she struggled to learn English as adult, she feared having to learn a new computer language. "But back then, I thought I couldn't do it. Max made me feel like I could."

Because English was his second language, Villalobos says, he understood Hassan's fear.

"I'm sensitive to that," he said. "When I moved to America at age 12 I didn't speak of word of English, and it was just very challenging."