Dr. Robert Kent, president and chief executive of Summa Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, recently received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Kent was honored in the health care and life sciences category for the Northeast Ohio region.
The physician helped lead the hospital’s conversion from Cuyahoga Falls General Hospital into a joint venture between area doctors and Summa Health System.
According to a news release, the conversion helped save the struggling hospital and retained more than 600 jobs in the community.
When he accepted the award last week at a dinner in Cleveland, Kent credited the hospital’s dedicated physicians, nurses and staff.
“Our commitment to challenging the status quo of how a hospital should operate has been met with industry reluctance, bureaucratic barriers and regional market resistance,” he said. “But our dogged perseverance to the mission of always putting the patient first has allowed us to hurdle those obstacles, proving the naysayers wrong, and finding us early and continued success.”
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