TIFTON — On Wednesday, Dec. 20, William “Bill” Richardson finished his last Tift County Hospital Authority meeting as CEO of Tift Regional Health System.

The next day, he sold his house and moved to Florida.

“I’m a Florida resident now,” he said Dec. 21 before heading out.

It’s the culmination of almost 30 years serving as CEO for Tift Regional Health System, but the start of his career goes back further than that.

He grew up in Brewton, Alabama.

The youngest of three children, Richardson lost both his older sisters to skin cancer.

When he was in elementary school, he lost his oldest sister, Nell. Then as a sophomore, he lost Julianne.

“It has an impact on you,” said Richardson. “It puts you in a position. Witnessing things like that with loved ones close to you…that really drove me to healthcare.”

Richardson started working summers in hospitals as an operating room orderly and supply technician.

“That was in my early years, summer jobs,” he said.

When he started college, he quickly realized that the doctor route wasn’t for him.

“I don’t have the mental acuity to be a physician,” Richardson said, laughing. “I’m not wired [for it].”

A friend of his mentioned he had a neighbor who was a professor of healthcare management.

The business side of a hospital was something Richardson had never considered.

“My perception of hospitals were nurses and doctors who were always in a hurry,” said Richardson.

After earning a Master of Science in Healthcare Administration at University of Alabama, Richardson started his career on the business side of things.

He was working in LaGrange when he got a call that steered the rest of his career.

“Tifton called me one night,” said Richardson. “I wasn’t pursuing a new job, but I decided to look at it.”

He came down to what was then Tift General and interviewed with the board, a informal affair as he describes it.

By the time he toured the hospital and got the tour of Tifton from board member John Prince, his mind was made up.

“I felt a palpable cooperative sense in this community that was quite unlike anything I had seen,” said Richarson. “A common understanding of where we wanted this to go. I just felt the connection with the board, the medical staff. There’s something that resonated with Tift General in a sense of cooperation with the medical community that I found appealing. I felt like this would be a good place to continue my career.”

Richardson came down June 1, 1988, and went to work immersing himself in the hospital.

Healthcare has changed greatly since Richardson started out and Tift Regional has changed with it.

Tift General changed its name to Tift Regional Medical Center in 2001 and then Tift Regional Health System in 2013.

Along the way they’ve added a number of departments and services, including cardiovascular care, dialysis, and oncology and cancer treatment, something close to Richardson’s heart as well as being valuable to the community.

In the 2000s, as physicians in the medical world began moving away from independent operations to becoming part of a hospital or health system, the same happened here, especially when Tift Regional brought Affinity Group under its umbrella.

“They could have virtually imploded,” said Richardson. “They could have gone under, closed. Those physicians could have exited this community.”

That led to more “practices coming in and saying ‘we’d like to be employed at the hospital.’”

“And the [new] doctors we were employing, they didn’t want to hang their own shingle,” said Richardson. “It’s grown now to where we employ, I’d say, 80 percent of the physicians at the hospitals.”

Those are two of the big decision points Richardson has seen in his time, bringing Affinity Clinic in under the TRHS umbrella and the change of employment model for physicians.

A third was fighting off Phoebe Putney Health System in Albany when they wanted to establish a presence in Tifton.

“We fought Phoebe’s aggression,” said Richardson. “The decision making would have switched from Tift County to Dougherty County.”

The argument could be made that another big decision point was about four years ago.

That’s when Richardson, along with a few other TRHS administrators, realized they were all going to retire around the same time.

“I recognized it,” said Richardson. “I’ve actually extended my contract a couple of years at their [the board’s] request. I probably would have retired a couple of years ago.”

Richardson didn’t want to leave the board and the system in a bind when he left, so he and the board members started searching for a replacement then and there, someone they could bring on and have them familiar with the system before Richardson left.

Chris Dorman, now CEO of TRHS, was the youngest person the board interviewed, Richardson says, but their unanimous choice.

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

Dorman started in October in 2013, against the advice of former co-workers and schoolmates.

“Most relationships like this don’t work,” said Dorman. “Most transitions like this one are very, very difficult. Typically, one CEO coming into another CEO typically lasts about six months. I was nervous about that.”

Interviewing 25 years after Richardson, Dorman notes many of the same things that attracted him to the position, namely a connection between doctors, nurses and staff and the administration side.

“It’s incredible,” said Dorman. “There’s a lot of hospitals around us that are so far away from that. They’re struggling with everything, from operations to finances to engaging their people. And it’s all because they don’t know how to include the physicians and the staff in the decisions they make.”

“I took a chance and it has been one of the best decisions I’ve every made,” said Dorman. “This relationship has been incredible. Bill has been an incredible mentor for me and has taught me so much, just by being great. He’s always adamant that employees are first and foremost, most important. We take care of them, they take care of our patients.”

While Richardson has turned over the reins, he still has a few ideas about what might happen in the coming years.

“We’re not merging and we’re not combining with anyone,” said Richardson. “But what might happen is we develop partnerships with other systems in the state…Not a merging, but collaboration.”

And though he’s transitioning out of the industry, healthcare is still on his mind.

“One of the things I hope to see in the future is for hospitals to go more into the area of population health,” said Richardson.

It’s something he started before he left.

Earlier this year, TRHS received a $3.5 million grant to fund population health initiatives, essentially taking pre-emptive steps with patients that lead to better overall health.

Retirement was the furtherest thing from from his mind, Richardson says, when he started.

“I certainly felt good here, but I didn’t think it would be my entire career,” said Richardson. “I probably thought I would move on to another hospital.”

He’s had offers in the last 29 years, but none he’s accepted.

“I’d have an internal conversation with myself,” said Richardson. “‘You’re part of something good here.’ I’ve seen physicians come and go here and come back. I decided I was going to stay at Tift.”

And while he wouldn’t change any of that, there’s a sense of excitement with the big change.

“It’s kind of a freedom,” he said. “For my entire career, I’ve carried a sense of responsibility for a hospital, everywhere I’ve been. You’re not only thinking about the care of the patients, you’re thinking of the livelihood of, now, 2,400 people. It’s a great sense of responsibility. It’s a place people come to in their most vulnerable time. They’re sick, they’re scared. You can’t become hardened to that.”

Not that he’ll forget any time soon.

He’s agreed to be available to the board and TRHS for at least 10 hours a month and says he plans to keep attending the monthly Tift County Hospital Authority meetings.

“I’ve been begging him to stay in some role,” said Dorman. “I know he’s sold his house, but I have a guest bedroom and I’ve got it ready for him, anytime he wants to come.”