In the words of a man who embraced change, engaged the people around him and elicited self-discipline to emerge as one of America’s most influential historical figures and a founding father, “Well done is better than well said.” What Benjamin Franklin intended of that statement Lovelace Medical Center Chief Operating Officer Jarren Garrett seeks to achieve in the mission of caring for others every day. “We want to be forward learning so that we can be better today than we were yesterday,” Jarren explains of a hospital culture built on transparency, trust and communication. From a host of national quality awards and notable recognition as a top workplace, Jarren says recent achievements for the hospital speak to the reason why he decided to join Lovelace in 2015. “I chose to come to Lovelace because of the leadership team led by Chief Executive Officer Troy Greer. My goals and my values are aligned with the organization.”
Jarren’s goals and values have been shaped over the course of his career in health care, which pivoted the day he submitted a college essay explaining his reasons for wanting to become a dentist. “One of my top reasons was my family heritage with dentistry,” he recalls. Jarren’s father, twin brother and brother-in-law are all dentists. While he shared their passion and desire to help people, Jarren discovered that he wanted to help in a different way. At 26, he began a career in outside sales for the country’s largest privately-held home care company. Quickly, Jarren moved into operations, then branch manager and began leading people as vice president by 29. Five years later, he took an opportunity to learn hospital operations and was eventually promoted from business development to chief administration officer. At 18 years into his health care career, Jarren says he never lost sight of the purpose. “You get to see life as it begins. It is humbling to see it as it ends. This is a calling.”
It is the reason he answered the phone during a high school football game in the fall of 2014. Lovelace Medical Center CEO Troy Greer wanted to talk to Jarren about his views on culture, strategy and his own goals. They talked for two hours. “He and I see eye to eye,” Jarren explains of the decision to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico and serve as chief operations officer at Lovelace Medical Center. In his career, Jarren has learned that before action, you must listen. “I want to spend time listening so that I can truly understand – the past state, current state and future state.”
Jarren spent the first three to six months at Lovelace listening to physicians, nurses, staff and other leaders. “Then I thought about what I heard,” he adds. “We developed action plans and communicated the why and how. You do that through telling stories – about the journey and the destination. It is important for everyone to understand, ‘This is where we are going.’”
To get there, Jarren and the Lovelace Medical Center leadership team began two initiatives to provide greater transparency and oversight into daily operations. “We established a radar meeting every morning at 8:30 a.m. with our executive team to collectively meet as a team and discuss our numbers, volumes, hot topics and any issues from the past 24 hours,” he says. “Next, we created variance meetings focused on quality to report any deviation from policies, processes or protocol so that we knew what happened to learn and get better. You have to have a culture of trust and transparency to make this work. Then you have to communicate the change so that it doesn’t happen again. These two initiatives, among many others, showed that we were a committed, unified front and helped develop a just culture.”
Why does this matter? Jarren quotes John C. Maxwell: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Like Jarren, the physicians, nurses and staff at Lovelace Medical Center wanted to help people as well – providing quality health care with compassion, respect, accountability and responsibility. Organizations like Healthgrades, The American Heart Association and The American Stroke Association took note, recognizing the hospital in quality achievements among a variety of services. “Then we received the Quality Award from Ardent,” Jarren says of the achievement recognized among parent company Ardent Health Services’ hospitals across the country. Not only was Lovelace Medical Center providing top patient care, employees loved where they worked. In 2017, the hospital was recognized by Modern Healthcare as one of the Best Places to Work in Healthcare for the second year in a row. “We ranked fifteenth in 2016 of all health care companies. That was the most impressive award for me. These awards tell me that we have our heart in the right place. We’re doing the right things for the right reasons.”
Those reasons extend beyond the borders of New Mexico. When Hurricane Harvey arrived in Southeast Texas, Jarren knew he needed to be there for his wife and son, who had just moved back to finish his son’s senior year of high school. 
Jarren and his brother borrowed their dad’s fishing boat and headed out to help people. A CBS news crew happened to be with them covering rescue efforts when they came across a nursing home. They, along with dozens of boats and rescuers, pulled more than 70 patients to safety within an hour.
Doing something, Jarren believes, is always possible and always better than just saying you’re going to do it. “If you want to make a difference, you can,” he simply states.
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