Most Influential Women: Kathleen Parrinello

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Kathleen Parrinello
Chief operating officer, Strong Memorial Hospital

Kathleen Parrinello left Ohio more than 30 years ago for Rochester to become a nurse, an objective she achieved, and then some.
Along the way, Parrinello made the transition from nurse to administrator, moving up the ranks to the point where today she is a key player in the local health care community as the chief operating officer of the 5,000-employee Strong Memorial Hospital at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Parrinello says her highest achievement has been the role she has played in expanding access to medical services to people in the Rochester region by orchestrating some of the initiatives at Strong Memorial Hospital, specifically the emergency department and the operating-room expansions.
She has been COO at Strong Memorial Hospital since March 2000. Prior to that, Parrinello was senior director for hospital operations.
The 49-year-old Elyria, Ohio, native began her career at Strong Memorial Hospital as a staff nurse in 1975. She went on to become a nursing administrator before moving into hospital administration.
Parrinello also briefly was a nursing educator in Chicago in the late ’80s when her husband, former UR head football coach Richard Parrinello, was football coach at the University of Chicago.
She received all three of her degrees-bachelor’s and master’s in nursing and doctorate in education-from UR.
The one thing Parrinello has done that she believes has influenced the most people was being instrumental in helping put together one of the first hospital-based acute-care nurse practitioner positions in the nation at Strong Memorial Hospital in the early ’80s.
“Now every hospital in Rochester and most of the hospitals in the country rely on nurse practitioners to basically meet all of the patient care needs in hospitals,” she says. “I’m happy to say that we supported some of the very first acute-care nurse practitioners and really got that off the ground.”
A key aim for her is to assure that people in the Rochester area have access to both high-quality and affordable health care.
The Pittsford resident, who enjoys playing tennis, paddle tennis and golf, is on the boards of Visiting Nurse Service of Rochester and Monroe County Inc., Mercy Flight Inc., the Finger Lakes Health Systems Agency and the New York Center for Liver Transplantation Inc. She also is on the board of Rural/Metro Medical Services and is on the regional advisory board of KeyBank N.A.
Parrinello and her husband have three children-Michael, 25, who is in the MBA program at UR’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration; Jeffrey, 22, a student at Nazareth College of Rochester; and Stephen, 21, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, who currently is studying at the London School of Economics.
Parrinello’s son Michael and his wife, Jennifer, also work at Strong Memorial Hospital; Michael works in the pharmacy and Jennifer, as her mother-in-law started out, is a nurse.

06/06/03 (C) Rochester Business Journal