Louis Kraml, an Innovative Rural Health Leader
Louis Kraml is the CEO of Bingham Memorial Hospital, a small project initiated by a group of people living in Bingham County, Idaho. It started as a local 60 bed hospital back in 1950, but now it has become a modern medical facility that has budgets of about 250,000,000 dollars each year.
It wasn’t an easy effort, but it looks like Louis Kraml has managed to push Bingham Memorial Hospital in the right direction. In the beginning, BMH couldn’t afford to hire more than 15 doctors, but nowadays the medical staff has grown to about 200 people. Not only that, but many other local residents have been hired by the hospital, so the total number of area residents that work for the hospital is close to 750 people now. Believe it or not, this makes the medical institution led by Louis Kraml the fifth employer in the entire county of Bingham, a premiere when it comes to rural hospitals.
As Louis Kraml admits on his personal website at louiskraml.com, these impressive results wouldn’t have been achieved if it weren’t for this team, a team in which Kraml has invested a lot – and it shows! There is a strong set of core values (teamwork spirit, honesty, mutual care, etc to name just a few) and they are fully embraced not only by the management team, but also by the medical staff.
During his first few years as BMH’s CEO, Louis Kraml has focused his energy on attracting the best doctors in the area. Sure, having an impressive hospital building is a good thing, but if the doctors aren’t skilled and compassionate at the same time, the health care act suffers. Kraml is constantly hiring doctors, and the details of his recruiting campaign that can be found at playwhereyouwork.com, a clever way of presenting Idaho’s beautiful scenery as a bonus for all the doctors that are interested in working in a top of the line hospital and spending their free time practicing various sports in Idaho’s beautiful mountains.
I am not sure if Louis Kraml’s efforts have something to do with this, but Idaho is now one of the best places in the country when it comes to practicing medicine. It looks like the doctors really know how to do their jobs here, so Idaho is one of the states with the fewest complaints in the entire US. Couple that with the great salaries, which often times exceed the ones that are paid even in some of the largest American cities, and you have got the recipe for success.
Bingham Memorial Hospital has been constantly growing with Louis Kraml at its helm. Today it’s not just a regular hospital anymore; the finest birthing center in the area was added to BMH a few years ago. Even some of the larger rural hospitals are sometimes unable to serve their patients, because they lack the needed equipment; fortunately, Louis Kraml has focused his energy on building a state of the art emergency medicine section as well. It is a very welcome addition for all the Bingham County locals, who don’t have to spend hours driving to a large city hospital because they can’t get the needed help at their local medical center.
Weight management is a major problem in the US at the moment, and Louis Kraml is well aware of that. Recent studies show that about 35% of Americans suffer from obesity, and this condition is also a trigger for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc. Due to Louis Kraml’s initiatives, BMH has started to offer effective weight management programs, which offer the benefit of making the people healthier, while lowering the overall medical costs per patient with about $1,500 per year. It’s a win-win situation, and Kraml has successfully implemented it at Bingham Memorial Hospital.
The hospital also offers surgical services and patient rehabilitation services. Heartburn relief, a condition that affects about 45% of the American citizens, is an important part of BMH’s activity. According to Louis Kraml, the new therapeutical massage clinic can also server people that need to stay hospitalized for a while, helping them maintain their strength even if they have to remain immobilized for several days.
Louis Kraml proves that the American rural health has a good looking future. This makes you wonder how many small, rural hospitals which are now closed would still be serving their local residents if they had a Kraml-like manager.