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Diane Gaddis

New Position: President, CEO, Community Health Centers Alliance, St. Petersburg. Previous Position: Vice president, CIO/COO, Community Health Centers Alliance, St. Petersburg

By Times Staff Writer
Published April 11, 2005

When Diane Gaddis was named president and chief executive of Community Health Centers Alliance last month, she already was handing many of the responsibilities.

Gaddis has been with the organization for five years and was assisting the part-time CEO.

"Since I was essentially doing the role without the title and authority," she said, "there was no big fanfare. It was business as usual."

Community Health Centers Alliance is a statewide network of 17 community health care organizations, many of which serve rural counties. Collectively, member health centers serve more than 260,000 Floridians, more than half of whom are uninsured. Member health centers can be found from Key West to Tallahassee, Lake City and Palatka. In the Tampa Bay area, they include Premier Community Health Care Group in Pasco County and Thomas E. Langley Medical Center, serving Citrus, Sumpter and Hernando counties.

Another factor that made Gaddis' transition go smoothly involves a current major project: the implementation of an electronic health records system. "It's one of our major projects," she said, and it has been a primary focus of her energies for several months.

"Electronic health care records are important nationally. Our goal is to have all of our members on it in three to five years," she said. "This is also in conjunction with some of the state efforts to focus on electronic health records. It's a very aggressive goal."

Gaddis said another major goal is to add more health centers to the alliance. "An affiliation of community health care centers provides tools and services they could not afford to get on their own or have access to in their own communities," Gaddis said.

"Community health centers are the safety net providers," she said. "They provide primary care and other services to the population that is either uninsured or below the poverty level."

Often, Gaddis said, her workweek approaches 60 hours. "Forty hours a week would be a vacation," she said. But she said she has no regrets.

"I'm not a doctor, not a nurse, so I can't personally impact a person's life, but by providing tools to health centers, indirectly I am," she said.

"As you grow older," said Gaddis, 40, "you learn the important things in life: making a difference in the world. You can't take on the whole world, but you can do something."

Gaddis was born in Omaha, Neb., and moved to St. Petersburg with her family when she was 16. In 2000, she earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of South Florida. While in college, she focused on learning how to manage technology.

Years earlier in high school, Gaddis said, she knew she "wanted to do something with management and something in the computer field, and that's what I'm doing. I guess (the goal) was always there."

She began working in the medical equipment industry. After working for several companies in the Tampa Bay area, Gaddis "migrated into the employee leasing field," including nearly five years with Criterion Leasing.

She went into community health care in 1993, joining the finance department of Community Health Centers of Pinellas and eventually becoming manager of the department. When the Community Health Centers Alliance was formed in 2000, she was recruited as chief information officer.

"I'm not a techie," she said. "It's important when you're managing technology to first understand the business and the business needs, and then find the right people to implement the technology."

Gaddis and her husband, John, have two children and live in St. Petersburg.

Gaddis said one of her personal goals this year is to unclutter the house. "I'm constantly looking for stuff that clutters the house," she said. "That's my goal for this year: purge.

"We live in such a paper-cluttered world. I got one closet cleaned out last year. My goal is to fill a trash can before it goes to the curb."

[Last modified April 9, 2005, 07:10:29]