This Indiana Hospital’s Dedication to Its Patients Goes Beyond Its Walls – ryan

Most people don’t want to get job performance reviews from strangers while perusing the cereal aisle at their local grocery store. But the staff at Hendricks Regional Health in west central Indiana embrace the connection to their patients.

“None of us (Hendricks employees) can go to a restaurant or church or grocery store without running into somebody who is either a patient or a loved one of a patient here,” Chief Strategy Officer Gary Everling told Newsweek. “Trust me, we will hear about it if things didn’t go exactly right. Almost all of us live in the same community and that level of accountability, we’re honestly thankful for it.”

Hendricks’ goal is to be an “indispensable health and wellness partner” in the community. Everling said that “indispensable” is a “strong word,” but biannual community surveys show that over 80 percent of respondents agree that Hendricks is an essential care provider. Everling said he’d know if patients weren’t happy.

Hendricks Regional Health is a staple in the central Indiana community, serving 6,657 inpatients and 431,216 outpatients annually in Hendricks, Putnam and Marion counties, which covers Indianapolis and surrounding areas.

The hospital is now gaining recognition for its efforts to bring exceptional and personal care to its community. The hospital debuted on Newsweek’s World’s Best Hospitals 2025 ranking, which highlights over 2,400 of the best hospitals across 30 countries.

The ranking, which was built in coordination with Statista, considers various hospital quality metrics, patient satisfaction scores, peer recommendations and accreditations to compare health systems nationally and internationally. There were 180 newly recognized hospitals on the list from 24 different countries, including Hendricks, which ranked 337 on the U.S. hospital list. According to Statista, Hendricks scored particularly high on patient satisfaction and quality metrics.

This tri-county area is one of the fastest growing in the state. According to the 2024 Hendricks Regional Health Community Health Needs Assessment, the population in all three countries is expected to increase by 2.6 percent from 2024 to 2029. Hendricks County is the third fastest-growing county in Indiana, with a projected population growth of 30 percent by 2050.

In Putnam and Marion County, there is also a high rate of residents with disabilities, and poverty rates in Marion that exceed both the state and national average, according to Hendricks’ data.

The hospital’s mission is to deliver “exceptional health care” for these residents. For President and CEO Dr. Michelle Fenoughty, this means more than providing quality medical care.

“It’s the personal touch, it is knowing your patients, it’s understanding who they are and what they want and providing the right services for them at the right time and including them and their family in their decision,” she told Newsweek. “We look at work as an opportunity to deliver health care to our neighbors, and we see it as a privilege.”

Primary care is the cornerstone of Hendricks Regional Health, but the health system offers a range of specialty care. In 2022, Hendricks also joined the Mayo Clinic Care Network, granting it access to Mayo’s expertise and resources.

Hendricks has received a five-star rating from Healthgrades for quality and patient safety in 2023-2024, as well as the treatment of heart failure, respiratory failure, sepsis, gastrointestinal bleed and diabetic emergencies from 2022 to 2025. Healthgrades also rated Hendricks as a Top 3 hospital for cardiology in Indiana in 2024.

“We have a lot of patients,” Chief Operating Officer Shane Sommers said. “But they feel like they are the most important patient at that time.”

As a regional hospital, Hendricks proves that the key to a successful hospital starts with focusing on the needs of the local community. The hospital has received an Outstanding Patient Experience Award from Healthgrades for 16 years in a row.

Making the patient feel safe and special starts with hiring top-tier staff.

“The underpinnings of all our success of our various specialty areas is really the culture of the organization, that’s so foundational and fundamental to what we do every day,” Everling said. “As an independent, medium-sized health care system, that’s how we stay relevant in our market to our employers or patients, to recruiting really, really good staff positions.”

In the hospital, CEO Fenoughty says her staff leads by example—joking that she can’t even say “good morning” first because everyone beats her to it.

Several years ago, Hendricks partnered with the Disney Institute to create an internal culture that boosts the patient experience. Through that partnership, Hendricks developed seven core values: respect, courage, engagement, collaboration, empathy, integrity and loyalty. Fenoughty believes these expected behaviors for her employees cannot be taught.

“They’re ingrained in your DNA, so if you hire people whose values match our corporate values, they fit your culture,” she said. “People who behave like our values day in and day out, that’s natural to who they are. They always do the right thing, so we don’t spend time teaching that. We underline and enforce it. We do a really good job of hiring for those values.”

Being a top hospital isn’t just about treating patients. It’s also about highlighting staff when they excel and supporting them through the hard times.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a stressful time for everyone, especially frontline health care workers. Since the pandemic began, Fenoughty said, many seasoned staff members retired. Over the last five years, the hospital has worked to acclimate new staff to the culture. This was especially tough with contract nurses and staff and for employees who were coming straight out of education to interact with patients for the first time.

“The one thing we found was we needed to refocus our associates because our patients aren’t going to be happy if they don’t see our team is happy,” she said. “So bringing our team back and building our team back as a priority has filtered down to the patient satisfaction.”

The hospital offers free physical and mental health resources as well as a leadership development program to help staff advance their careers and build a better future for themselves.

Hendrick’s passionate employees also allow the hospital to build trust within the community.

“We really try to collaborate, not just within our walls but outside the walls too,” Sommers said. “It’s challenging, but we try to build those relationships. Relationship building is so important to get real, appropriate feedback.”

In addition to offering services like heart and lung scans and colon, breast and skin cancer screenings Hendricks works to understand the health needs of residents and strategizes actionable solutions.

“It’s not just about getting patients well, it’s also about encouraging our patients to stay well,” Fenoughty said. “And the importance of wellness and preventative health care, nutrition, exercise, all the things that keep them with a quality of life that they would enjoy into their elderly years.”

Hendricks partners with nearly 150 nonprofit organizations and is involved with more than 200 community events each year, including several nonprofit organizations to support mental health awareness and outreach.

Every three years, Hendricks conducts a Community Health Needs Assessment to tap into the health and wellness needs of the community and the available resources to offer targeted and vital services. The assessment includes direct input from interviews, community meetings and surveys, as well as collected data from business intelligence platforms and local, state and federal government agencies.

COO Sommers said the assessment is a “validation of the path we’re heading down.”

Hendricks has also partnered with 14 local K-12 school systems and two colleges across five Indiana counties to provide nurses, athletic trainers, wellness teams and physicians at sporting events to help students, staff and their families get healthier.

From these assessments, Fenoughty said the hospital has identified where families are experiencing food or housing insecurities and where there is a lack of transportation for patients to get to appointments. This allows the hospital to partner with food banks, transport services and organizations like Meals on Wheels to address those needs and ensure residents, especially the poor and elderly, are getting the care they need.

“Knowing what the needs are and being able to match it back with what we are seeing on the health side in our medical records helps us know what resources we need to be experts on in the community,” she said.

Accessibility has been a major concern for patients, with many people having to travel long distances to receive specialized care. In response, Hendricks has made several additions to its suite of treatments, such as its first urogynecology practice and FibroScan testing at the gastroenterology office to measure liver health.

It also opened a medical office building at Brownsburg Hospital that offers more services, like cardiology cardiovascular testing, primary care and family medicine, gastrointestinal, general surgery, orthopedics and nephrology in the area.

To address inequities in accessing health care, Hendricks provides financial assistance education and writes patient care instructions and education materials in accessible language to ensure they can be understood by all, and ensures information is available in different languages.

Fenoughty said the hospital is concerned about where Indiana falls on national health rankings—specifically the statistic that 40 percent of children nationwide meet the criteria for obesity and that this generation of children is the first that’s predicted to have a shorter lifespan and decreased quality of life compared to their parents.

“We’ve doubled down on fundamentals, not just clinically but from a leadership development standpoint,” Everling said. “If you look at our strategic plan, you’re not going to find very many trick plays. It’s based on fundamentals and what we believe is important to build an infrastructure to continue with new leaders in the culture.”