Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital CEO Deb Angerami leads with authenticity

Third in a series of articles about southwest Georgia women in leadership roles.

ALBANY – Deb Angerami is Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital’s first female CEO in its 113 years of operation. Since taking on the position in 2022, she said she’s worked to heighten Phoebe’s efficiency – bringing back contracted staff and improving patient satisfaction and quality metrics in the hospital’s emergency center.

Angerami was also a part of the leadership team that was able to secure Phoebe’s designation as a Level II trauma center.

This is Angerami’s first CEO position, but she has an extensive background in hospitals. After graduating from the University of Florida, she began working at a hospital system in Brevard County. She worked for 22 years at Health First – holding multiple roles. She called herself “the definition of hard-work-meets opportunity,” during this time.

Angerami was promoted 12 times in her first 10 years with the company. She said about half of those positions didn’t exist before her.

“I created them,” she said. “I was working on a project or area and said, ‘Hey there’s a niche here, somebody needs to get in here and do this,’ and so I created the position.”

The CEO is from the Albany, N.Y., area and grew up with a father who worked at the health department. Angerami said he was her exposure to health care, and she grew to love the way the field impacts people’s lives.

“What we do makes a huge difference in people’s lives … and to the community,” she said. “Everywhere hospitals do that, but especially in an area like Albany where we’re the largest employer. So we have a lot of responsibility.”

Angerami said when her father got sick in 2021 and eventually passed away, she resigned from her position in Florida to be with her family.

Two months later, she said she began looking for jobs again. In 2022, she moved to Albany to take the position at Phoebe.

The move from south Florida brought on changes. The hospital she worked with prior was in a county with 600,000 people compared to Dougherty County’s about 85,000. However, she said the quality and kind of health care provided at Phoebe is unlike any other in a community of this size.

She pointed out the capabilities of Phoebe’s NICU, its Simulation and Innovation Center, its nursing Living and Learning Center, and the strength and size of its oncology program.

“The resources we have are bigger than what we had in my system in Florida, even though the community here is smaller,” Angerami said. “It’s nice to see the investment in resources.”

As a new CEO, Angerami said she is navigating how to ensure that everything in the hospital is functioning to its highest degree and that the community is receiving high quality and compassionate care.

She said there is more of a visionary and strategic part of being a CEO as well.

“Our job is to look out to the future and to see what our community is going to need, what services should we be providing and where people are having to leave our community, when they could be staying here for health care,” Angerami said.

And the CEO already has had an impact on making a brighter future for Phoebe.

She has helped the emergency center team improve its efficiency and patient satisfaction. When Angerami started at the hospital, Phoebe’s emergency center had a Left Without Treatment (LWOT) rate of about 10%.

“If it’s 10%, that’s 10 people out of every 100 walking into your emergency room and walking out because the waits are too long,” she said.

On a day in the first week of March, she said, the emergency center saw 190 people. One person walked out.

Angerami said while the hospital never wants anyone to walk out, that is about a 0.5% LWOT rate. National best practice in the U.S. is 2%.

“That makes me really proud, especially as we’re looking at opening this big, beautiful new emergency center,” she said. “I think a lot of the work we’ve done is around the value-added time for our patients, not making them waste their time waiting for things that don’t add value.”

Angerami said she’s also worked to increase the number of employed nurses versus contracted ones – an issue that was exacerbated with the COVID-19 pandemic. She said during the height of the pandemic, Phoebe had as many as 500 contractors. It’s since reduced that number to about 150.

“That’s been a huge change and allows us to grow our nursing students,” she said.

She said the kindness and openness of Albany’s Southern community also has been a great change.

In fall 2023, Angerami connected with a group of community members, mostly women, through the Albany Area Chamber of Commerce’s PROPEL program, which connects and engages working women within the community.

Angerami gave a presentation on authenticity, and she said she pushed herself to be vulnerable despite facing a new community where she didn’t yet know everyone.

“I have the biggest job title that I’ve had yet, and people might have certain expectations of what someone in that job title is like,” she said. “It was scary to decide I’m going to share some things that I’m proud of now, but I wasn’t when they happened, and how I used those experiences to make me a better leader.”

Angerami said she shared deeply personal struggles that she overcame and learned from. When she finished, the room gave her a standing ovation. She said she received cards and emails from women thanking her and saying they had gone through similar experiences.

“It felt incredibly accepting,” she said. “I knew I had done the right thing in sharing to that level. I felt that this community of women was safe for me to do that with and then they could share their experiences so it just led to more connection.”

And Angerami makes it a point to pay her success forward and guide others. She said she believes in sharing the good and the bad, the successes and the failures.

“Success is going to move you forward to keep doing the same things in the same way,” Angerami said. “Failure is going to slow you down, make you stop and pause, and correct.”

She said she wants people to know it’s OK to make mistakes and that very few things are unrecoverable. She said this is important especially for women.

“I think women tend to beat themselves up,” Angerami said. “I think women need to know that it doesn’t have to be perfect all the time.”

She said she believes being a female CEO in health care has an impact on other women as well.

Angerami said about 80% of Phoebe’s staff are female.

“I think it’s helpful for the women coming up the ranks in health care to see someone at the top that looks like them,” she said.

She advised young women to go after and to be clear on what they want.

“The most important thing is to be coachable and to learn from other leaders and women that you respect,” Angerami said.

She said to never let someone else’s opinion dictate your future and to find those that believe in and encourage you.

Photo Courtesy of Ben Roberts, Phoebe