TIFTON — When his daughter Lenore was born in November 2012, Chris Dorman knew he had to make a change.

Dorman was working for Community Health Systems, one of the largest operators of acute care hospitals in the country.

The longer he was there, the more projects he had become involved with.

On the day his wife, Christy, gave birth to Lenore, Dorman was there but in a side room, on a conference call with the legal department working on a new acquisition.

“That’s not who I wanted to be,” said Dorman.

He thought about that moment over the next few months, missing that moment with his wife and newborn daughter.

His son, Keith, was born July 2009, and Dorman knew there were future moments with both of them that he’d miss if he stayed on the path he was on.

“That was my fault,” said Dorman. “It was who I had become, but it wasn’t who I wanted to be.”

Always fascinated by the medical field, Dorman’s introduction to it came when he was a teenager in North Carolina.

Hestarted a website building and networking business while still in high school, helping local businesses navigate the 90s internet.

“I started out building websites and got very involved with network setups, different kinds of computer applications,” said Dorman.

The business, Computerized Design, grew and started conflicting with with Dorman’s day job of being a high school student.

“So I pared down the business to be specific to one trade: healthcare,” said Dorman.

He met a local healthcare CEO, Shannon Brown, who acted as an early mentor.

“Shannon took me under his wing,” Dorman said. “I helped him with computer projects he had and he told me what it was like being a CEO.”

When Dr. Josette Maria, a new internal medicine physician, came to town and needed an office manager, Brown suggested Dorman.

Fifteen years old at the time, Dorman started as an office manager and slowly took on more and more of the work of running a practice, learning how to work payroll and accounts, paying bills and putting out paychecks.

He ended up selling controlling interest in Computerized Design to focus more on running Maria’s office, coming in after school and during school breaks and going through certified nursing training (CNA) and phlebotomy training through the local community college.

“I was fortunate to have that,” said Dorman. “She was an awesome mentor, showed me a lot of things…and pushed me to go to school.”

After a short, post-high school stint at New York University — “I and New York didn’t get along like I thought we would. I grew up in a town like Tifton.” — Dorman headed to Campbell University, then to East Carolina University, where he studied medicine at first before finding he was better suited to the business side of things.

While there, he started working for Carolinas Healthcare System running urgent care centers.

“It was like a mini-emergency department,” said Dorman. “That was the beginning of the stand alone emergency departments.”

After graduating with his Masters of Business Administration in 2006, Dorman worked for a series of medical businesses, running urgent care centers and medical practices.

He slowly starting taking on more and more hospital departments, eventually working for Community Health Systems.

Which brings us back to Lenore.

Six months after she was born, Dorman started looking for another way.

“May of 2013, publicly traded healthcare systems were going down a path that I wasn’t really excited about,” said Dorman. “I learned so much at Community Heath Systems. It was a great company, really supportive of doing the right thing for the patients. But as it got bigger, it was more and more interested in what the value of the stock was. At that point in my life, I was beyond that. I had young children I hadn’t seen awake in a long time.”

He started searching for a hospital in the southern United States with a specific situation: A longtime CEO who was looking to retire.

“The average CEO tenure is about four and a half years,” said Dorman. “I wanted to be somewhere I could develop something big and grow an organization. I wasn’t looking for something that was part of a huge system.”

And after making 14 moves in 11 years for his work, he was looking for a place to stay.

“My son was going to begin kindergarten,” said Dorman. “I wanted somewhere my son could begin kindergarten and graduate from high school in the same community.”

That led him to Tift Regional Health Systems and former longtime CEO Bill Richardson in July of 2013.

“I loved Bill Richardson,” said Dorman. “He was the only person who interviewed me who was more interested in my family that he was me.”

Richardson wanted someone who would come on board and be a kind of co-CEO. After leading TRHS for more than two decades, he wanted to guide someone through its operations and complexities before handing over the reins.

“I wanted to bring someone in who was dialed into the metrics of the operations,” said Richardson in a Tifton Gazette interview late last year. “Chris has that in spades. He’s well-schooled in that.”

After coming on board October 2013, Dorman worked under Richardson, learning the hospital and the system as a whole, working to streamline departments, reduce turnover and encourage feedback from staff.

“The first year I was here, I spent a lot of time just getting to know people, learning the processes, understanding the challenges everyone has,” said Dorman. “I probably spent more time in scrubs than I did in a suit, trying to understand how things work and why they work the way they do.”

With Richardson’s retirement at the end of 2017, this is Dorman’s first full year as CEO.

It will be a busy one.

The new musculoskeletal center for TRHS — right next door to Affinity Clinic — is set to be finished in May.

On March 8, TRHS held a ground breaking on the new Cook Medical Center in Adel.

The $40 million facility is expected to be finished in September 2019.

The 120,000-square-foot facility will offer the same services as the current facility, including acute inpatient care, medical imaging, laboratory services, rehabilitation, endoscopy, a sleep center, geriatric psychiatric care at The Sylvia Barr Center and skilled nursing care at Cook Senior Living.

The facility will have 20 hospital beds and 95 nursing home beds, will add a Convenient Care clinic instead of an ER and will house the current two primary care clinics, Cook Family Wellness and Cook Primary Care.

Additionally the new facility will offer an outpatient surgical suite, with potential surgical specialties including gastroenterology, general surgery, vascular surgery, orthopedics and podiatry.

Once completed, Cook Medical Center is expected to add approximately 50 new jobs.

In the fall, the plan is to start on Tift Regional’s new patient tower, a 250,000 square feet project.

The new tower will “essentially double our emergency room size,” said Dorman, as well as modernize patient rooms.

“We’ve got rooms built in 1965 that just aren’t conducive to today’s environment,” said Dorman.

The four-floor building will also allow for three additional floors to be built on top in the future if necessary.

A “massive IT system overhaul” is in the works, with two new software systems set to be implemented.

Lawson, a system that handles supply chain, payroll and finance be implemented live in stages over the next few months.

Cerner, a system that covers everything from billing and collections to post-acute care, is set to run in June. For a guy who got into the healthcare field by way of a technology company, it’s not surprising that Dorman focuses on data-driven decision-making.

“There’s not always data…but where there is, I want to use it,” said Dorman. “And where there’s not, I want to create it.

“If you have data and can compare it to other organizations, you can make better decisions. You’re based off facts, not anecdotal comments.”

There’s also the on-going challenge of any large organization, finding and retaining good staff.

“Finding the people we need to take care of people is also a big challenge,” said Dorman. “All the young people want to go to big cities. Finding doctors, nurses, techs, the people we need. That’s a big challenge for us.

“Now my belief is if we can become the greatest place to work in the world, it’ll be pretty easy to attract people here. So that’s our goal.”

That’s a lot to juggle for a first year, but it’s worth it for Dorman if it means more time with his kids.

Something as seemingly small as having breakfast with his kids before dropping them off at school would have been unheard of several years ago.

“My life as a dad has gotten so much better,” Dorman said. “Professionally, this has been a good move, but personally, it’s been an excellent move.”

“People here actually care about each other. I’ve lived in a lot of communities and I’ve never seen that. I want to retire here. I can’t think of a better place for my family to be raised.”