A Passion for Children Drives Sorini Family Gift
New C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s Hospital and pediatric emergency medicine benefit
Despite being a successful physician, attorney and businessman, Ernie Sorini,
M.D., is quick to tell you that that he is “just a little guy,”
and uses words such as “average” and “ordinary” to describe
himself. What Sorini and his wife, Kelly, are doing to advance emergency medicine
and strengthen children’s health at the University of Michigan, however,
is nothing short of extra-ordinary.
Through their recent $7 million gift to the U-M Health System, the Sorinis are
helping set the stage for new research they hope will reduce injury and disease,
especially among children, as well as for training the highest quality emergency
medicine physicians to provide expert and compassionate emergency care.
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| Ernie and Kelly Sorini Photo: Martin Vloet |
Of their gift, $2 million will fund an endowed professorship in the Medical
School — the Ernest John Sorini, M.D., Professorship in Emergency Medicine
— and $5 million will create the Sorini Family Children’s Emergency
Medicine Center in the new U-M C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s
Hospital.
U-M Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs and Health System CEO Robert
Kelch, M.D., says the Sorinis’ gift will be instrumental in helping the
Health System achieve its goal of continuing to offer the finest in children’s
emergency medical services.
“The Sorini Center will be a magnificent space in our new children’s
hospital, and a model for pediatric medicine in this country,” Kelch says.
“Michigan today is a leader in emergency medicine, and we’re excited
and proud that Ernest and Kelly’s gift will become a testament to outstanding
children’s emergency medical care at the U-M — now and into the
future.”
The Sorinis have seven children, including an 8-month-old. As busy parents with
an active family, the couple says they hope the Sorini Family Center will honor
their own children by helping the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s
Hospital facility become the standard-bearer for children’s emergency
medicine and, most importantly, to be a source of hope and comfort for families
near and far.
“Kelly and I are so fortunate to have healthy children,” says Ernie
Sorini, “but we also want the very best for all children. As parents,
we know that when you have a sick child who needs to go to the emergency room,
it’s natural to feel frightened and somewhat vulnerable. We wanted to
do something to help assure parents that, if they find themselves in such a
crisis, the care their children will receive at the U-M will be the highest
quality and most compassionate possible.”
That challenge — providing high-quality and compassionate care —
is very familiar to Ernie Sorini. After graduating from the Medical College
of Wisconsin and studying neurosurgery at the University of Utah, Sorini decided
to specialize in the field of emergency medicine, eventually working at several
southeast Michigan hospital systems, including Oakwood, Trinity, Henry Ford
and the University of Michigan.
Sorini says he soon became frustrated by the fact that so much of the time he
felt he should be devoting to patients was instead spent dealing with operational
inefficiencies.
A natural problem-solver, Sorini turned that frustration toward developing an
innovative business model that helped him reduce costs and deliver higher-quality
care, as well as improve in-patient care management, computerized physician
order entry, and hospital revenue-cycle management — all of which helped
reduce patient wait times substantially.
The model Sorini developed was so successful that he eventually was able to
establish a guarantee: his emergency room patients would be seen in less than
30 minutes. Since then, his 30-minute guarantee has become a national model
for emergency care.
In 1996, Sorini took the lessons he had learned and, along with Kelly, formed
a company, ER-One, which today provides numerous Michigan hospitals with high-quality
physicians, nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants. The company
also provides hospitals around the country with consulting services regarding
best practices aimed at efficiently delivering the most effective and compassionate
emergency care.
The Sorinis attribute much of ER-One’s success to their long-time friend
and business partner Don Massey, a legendary Detroit-area automobile dealer
and business entrepreneur.
“Much of what we know today about customer loyalty and service excellence
we learned as a result of our business association with Don Massey,” Sorini
says.
“Don Massey is the smartest guy I’ve ever met, and he’s taught
me virtually everything I know about the service industry. We intend to apply
the lessons we learned from him — and later fine-tuned in the medical,
auto and hotel industries — toward making the new Sorini Family Children’s
Emergency Medicine Center the most efficient, patient-friendly, ‘high-tech,
high-touch’ emergency department in the world, period.”
While improving the quality of emergency medical care remains an important goal
for the Sorinis, Ernie Sorini says that he and Kelly are especially interested
in finding practical ways to reduce childhood illnesses and injuries, as well
as developing ways to better care for very ill and critically injured children.
Ernie Sorini recalls a time when, as a child, he was hospitalized during a bout
with the flu. While recovering in a children’s ward, he awoke to a great
commotion in a nearby room where doctors were struggling to save the life of
another child who suddenly had become critically ill.
That child died, and Sorini says that to this day he remembers seeing the child
wheeled away, and becoming acutely aware that even the lives of children can
be cut short by tragedy. “The memory of that child and his bereaved parents
remains indelibly etched in my mind,” Sorini says.
That’s just one of the reasons that, through their gift, he and Kelly
hope to partner with the Health System in achieving its goal of becoming what
they call “a new national standard for children’s emergency services.”
In addition to being a busy mom and an active partner in running ER-One, Kelly
Sorini also is a strong advocate for women’s and children’s health.
As such, Kelly says that, like her husband, she is pleased to be able to support
the U-M’s efforts to improve pediatric emergency medicine.
“Ernie and I are absolutely passionate about children, and we want to
do everything possible to improve the medical care they receive,” she
says. “So when we decided to turn our passion into something more concrete,
it seemed only natural to turn our attention to the University of Michigan,
and to invest in enhancing what is already a leading center for children’s
health.”
Despite a gift that’s among the largest to the Health System during The
Michigan Difference fund-raising campaign, the ever-modest Ernie Sorini insists
that what he has done is really not that special.
“When people try to thank me, I tell them if you really want to thank
me then consider doing whatever you can to help support the outstanding people
at the U-M who work so hard every day to save lives, alleviate suffering, and
improve the quality of life for so many people,” he says.
—Glen Sard
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