Sorini Gift Supports Children's Health, Emergency Medicine
Ernest and Kelly Sorini provide U-M Health System with $7 million to help fund new C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and Women’s Hospital and to improve emergency medicine.
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| Kelly and Ernest Sorini |
Despite being a successful physician, attorney and businessman, Ernie Sorini is quick to tell you that that he is “just a little guy,” and frequently uses words such as “average” and “ordinary” to describe himself. However, what Sorini and his wife, Kelly, are doing to advance emergency medicine and strengthen children’s health at the University of Michigan 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.
Of their $7 million gift, $2 million will fund an endowed professorship in the Medical School – to be known as 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 Robert Kelch, M.D. says the Sorinis’ gift will be instrumental in helping the U-M Health System achieve its goal of continuing to offer the finest children’s emergency medical services anywhere.
“The Sorini Family Children’s Emergency Medicine Center will be a magnificent space in our new children’s hospital, and a model for pediatric medicine in this country,” says Kelch. “Michigan today is a leader in emergency medicine, and we are excited and proud that Ernest and Kelly’s gift will become a testament to outstanding emergency medical care at U-M now and into the future.”
The Sorinis have seven children, including a newborn. As busy parents with a large and active family, the couple say they hope the Sorini Family Children’s Emergency Medicine Center will honor their 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 both near and far.
“Kelly and I are so fortunate to have healthy children,” says Ernie Sorini. “We love our own children, but we also want the very best for allchildren. As parents, we know that when you have a sick child who needs to go to the emergency room, it’s only natural to feel frightened and somewhat vulnerable. We wanted to do something to help assure parents that, in the unfortunate event they find themselves in such a crisis, the care their children will receive at the U-M will be the of the highest quality and the 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.
However, Sorini says he soon became frustrated by the fact that so much of the time he felt he should be devoting to treating 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 to reduce costs and deliver higher-quality care, as well as in-patient care management, computerized physician order entry, and hospital revenue-cycle management – all improvements that helped substantially reduce patient wait times.
The model Sorini developed was so successful that he was eventually able to establish a patient 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 nation with consulting services regarding best practices aimed at efficiently delivering the most effective and compassionate emergency care.
The Sorinis say they 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 association with Don Massey,” says Ernie. “When our Cadillac, Rolls-Royce and Bentley dealership was sold to a publicly-traded company several years ago, we were the largest and most successful Cadillac dealers in the world.
“Mr. Massey is quite clearly the smartest guy I ever met, and he’s taught me virtually everything I know about the service industry. We intend to apply the lessons we learned from Mr. Massey 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 departments in the world, period.”
While continuing to improve the quality of emergency medical care remains an important goal for the Sorinis, Ernie says that he and Kelly are especially interested in finding practical ways to reduce childhood illnesses and injuries, as well as in developing ways to better care for very ill and critically injured children.
Ernie Sorini recalls a time when he himself, as a child, was hospitalized during a bout with the flu. While recovering in a children’s ward, he awoke to observe a great deal of commotion in a nearby room, where doctors were struggling to save the life of another child who had suddenly become critically ill.
That child died – and Sorini says that to this day he is haunted by the memory of seeing the child wheeled away, and of 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,” says Sorini.
That’s just one of the reasons that, through their gift, he and Kelly hope to partner with the U-M 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 is also a strong advocate for women’s and children’s health. As such, she 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 providing a gift that’s among the largest given to the U-M 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. If you can give a little, give a little; if you can give a lot, give a lot – but please do whatever you can.”