Dillard and Bergman have worked virtually side-by-side for the last 13 years, first at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati and then at Dayton Children’s starting in 2017.
“I am grateful that Chris has always been confident in my ability to take on a new area and grow through the experience,” said Dillard, who considers Bergman a mentor.
Bergman recruited Dillard from Christ Hospital after the former spent a year working in Dayton, part of a strategic initiative by Dayton Children’s president and CEO Debbie Feldman.
“Chris has the gift of strategic mind with a long-term focus — which he needed because we had a lot of growth to fund,” Feldman said. “He was able to see where we needed to go and began laying the groundwork from day one. We will miss him, but he is leaving us in tremendously capable hands.”
Under the financial leadership of Bergman and Dillard, Dayton Children’s saw its net patient revenue more than triple from $247 million in 2016 to $800 million this year, raised $240 million in its first public bond issue on Wall Street in 2021 to help fund a specialty care center and refinance debt from the construction of the patient tower, and pulled through the COVID pandemic with employee pay and benefits intact.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the work that we have done together,” Bergman said about Dillard and the Dayton Children’s team. ”Through it all, from patient access, figuring out a way to register kids quickly while standing out in the rain in our drive-thru COVID testing line to watching our first bond offering bring in $1 billion worth of interest on Wall Street as we overlooked the 9/11 memorial, it’s been almost surreal all the things we have done together."
Since joining Dayton Children’s in 2016, Bergman helped fund more than $800 million in capital projects including the recently opened Mathile Center for Mental Health and Wellness and an expansion to the urgent care in Springboro that added an emergency department, surgery center and clinic space.
Dillard said he plans to continue balancing the financial and human sides of things in what is becoming a more complex health care environment.
“At the end of the day, it’s ‘how do we support this community’ that’s important,” he said.
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