Gerlach gears up

Carl Gerlach only recently moved into his office at the Sonoma Valley Hospital, so he hasn’t had a lot of time to decorate.
But one of the knick-knacks that Gerlach, the hospital’s interim chief executive officer, has on his desk is a letter-holder that consists of two laughing Buddhas with their rubber bellies pressed together.
“I believe that Buddha’s advice is very, very beneficial,” said Gerlach, who described Buddhism as “not a religion as much as a guide for how to live.”
And when it comes to the burning question of how to replace the existing Andrieux Street hospital with a new hospital to meet state seismic standards, Gerlach’s answer strikes a Buddhist tone.
“I’m not attached to any option,” he said.
Gerlach has three top priorities for keeping the current hospital in business until a new one is built: attracting doctors, upgrading the hospital’s information systems, and improving the physical layout of such things as the emergency room.
“These are the things we need to do now, period,” he said.
“The information systems here need to be upgraded,” Gerlach said, including computers that track patients’ exams and those that archive radiology and other diagnostic images.
“Two thirds of all the work that’s done in healthcare is collecting data, recording data,” said Gerlach, who first learned that while earning his master’s in business administration from Stanford Business School, from which he graduated in 1973.
Gerlach got his first job in the healthcare field while studying at Stanford. He helped design and implement a community health information system at a rural health clinic in the Central Valley city of Livingston, which is home to major operations of the agri-business giants Foster Farms poultry and E.&J. Gallo wine.
A San Francisco native, Gerlach chose the summer job because it was close to Yosemite, where he liked to mountain-climb with a group of business-school buddies.
Other outdoor activities that Gerlach has pursued during his more than 30-year career in healthcare include competing in triathlons for about 15 years, with his last race in the early 90s.
“Maybe we can get an orthopedic surgeon that can heal me… fix my feet,” he joked.
Gerlach is an avid bicyclist now. His cycling partners include his wife Sandra and his young son, Nick. Gerlach has two older children: Claire, who’s a junior studying child development at the University of San Francisco, and Eric, who’s getting a master’s degree in comparative religion at the University of California, Berkeley.
Another knick-knack on display in Gerlach’s office is one of those palm-sized cans that makes the sound of a cow mooing when it’s turned upside down.
“The sacred-cow call,” is how Gerlach described the toy. It’s a keepsake from his days working in the mid-’90s as an executive vice president for Woodland Healthcare, west of Sacramento.
“We had horrible meetings,” he said.
To improve get-togethers, everyone was given a moo-sound noisemaker.
“When somebody would get on their high horse, everybody would turn (their cans) over,” said Gerlach, laughing at the memory of sometimes being “mooed” himself.
He’s not enamored of what comes out of the non-moo-end of a cow.
“I don’t like to exaggerate. I don’t like to misrepresent what I know and what I don’t know,” he said. “What you see is what you get.”
The Sonoma Valley Hospital board was expected to approve a contract with Gerlach at its meeting on Wednesday night officially making him the CEO and detailing such things as his salary. Details weren’t available at presstime.