Trustee Gary Rhule: A Lifetime of Caring for Community
Gary Rhule, MD, MPH, MBA, can trace a timeline of his journey joining Wheeler’s Board of Trustees, and his own impressive education and career, to his childhood receiving health care in the Hartford community.
“I had asthma as a kid, so I was always in the doctor’s office.” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This work is kind of interesting.’ and I had great doctors and nurses taking care of me. That’s how I started thinking about medicine as something I could do myself.”
Today, he has helped tens of thousands of children like that young Dr. Rhule, and his work has spanned a range from service as the director of health for the City of Hartford, to acquiring national expertise in population health management, to a unique merging of clinical skills, business acumen, and public health practice. Professionally, Dr. Rhule serves as the interim chief medical officer of CVS Aetna Better Health, Aetna Healthcare, in California, its medical director in Kentucky, and serves as an associate clinical professor in the Urban Services Track at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School at The University of Pennsylvania, an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, and his MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
With deep experience in medicine and health, Dr. Rhule understands the core issues of care at the heart of Wheeler’s work. He connects most of our future success back to where he started, care in the local community.
“Wheeler does great work with children and adolescents,” he continues. “That’s vital; those formative years make a difference. Helping our patients be healthy, productive, and smart at a young age sets them up for a successful future. That is Wheeler’s core strength and will continue to be. But I think we can expand our work integrating primary care and be known for that just as much. We must integrate every single process, take note of how digitalization is changing health care, and look at how we engage our patient communities.”
He understands our mutual communities well with his own personal engagements outside of Wheeler’s board. Dr. Rhule is also active with the Sickle Cell Association of America, Southern Connecticut Chapter, the West Indian Social Club in Hartford, and the Fox Foundation, which awards annual scholarships to graduating Hartford seniors.
“We have to do a better job reaching people where they live, where they are,” Dr. Rhule says. “They pass many local health care institutions every day. They can see that all of those organizations are there; they can see the ads. But there’s often a disconnect of trust, and we have to make it more comfortable for them to come in for care.
“Wheeler has a vision, making sure our community is healthy, seeing the whole person we help, and connecting them with services right where they live,” he adds. “Our work is to help people realize their visions. Over my career, the biggest change I’ve seen is the amount of increased information and resources for care that patients have.
But what’s not changed is, despite that fact, patients still have a hard time accessing care. We must do better for our patients to actually see those visions to reality."
