Washington, DC — Todd Krass, CEO of Research Belton Hospital in Belton, Mo., is the 2010 chair of the American Hospital Association's (AHA) Section for Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Services, a constituency section representing 1,300 behavioral health providers across the country that provides guidance in AHA's policy development and governance.
During his one-year term as chair, Krass and a 16-person governing council will work with the AHA to identify ways to define and focus AHA policy, advocacy, public policy issues, and member service strategies regarding healthcare systems.
Krass has served as CEO of Research Belton Hospital, a 71-bed community hospital, since 2005. Previously, he served as CEO of Research Psychiatric Hospital—a 100-bed freestanding psychiatric hospital—for 11 years. For the past seven years, he also has been responsible for the administration of behavioral health services for HCA's Midwest Division, an 11-facility system of hospitals, outpatient centers, clinics, physician practices, surgery centers, and an array of other services to meet the health care needs of the greater Kansas City area.
Krass implemented standardized assessment and documentation tools across the system, developed a regional behavioral health access call center, assisted in the development of psychiatric consult-liaison services in medical settings and expanded services by operating two additional community based outpatient offices. Previously, he served as the Research Psychiatric Center's director of patient care services. In all, Mr. Krass has 25 years of clinical, managerial, and administrative experience in psychiatric treatment settings.
His involvement in the Missouri Hospital Association Psychiatric Units and Hospitals Constituency Group, the Kansas City Metropolitan Hospital Council, and the Kansas City Area Psychiatric Taskforce has allowed him to help these groups collaborate for the benefit of all psychiatric hospitals in the area. Additionally, Krass has been active in creating collaborative relationships between public and private behavioral health providers in the Kansas City area. These collaborations have helped regional efforts to address the shortage of public beds by utilizing public funds to purchase private inpatient behavioral health beds, promote coordination between Missouri and Kansas to address the shortage of public beds in the Kansas City area, and develop a system that tracks psychiatric bed availability in the region for emergency response units.
Krass received his bachelor's degree in nursing from Washburn University in Topeka, Kan., and his master's degree in nursing from Corpus Christi State University in Texas.
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