CEO Receives National Award

CRUSADER COMMUNITY HEALTH’S CEO RECEIVES NATIONAL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN CLINICAL LEADERSHIP

GORDON EGGERS JR., PRESIDENT & CEO, CRUSADER COMMUNITY HEALTH, received the SAMUEL U. ROGERS ACHIEVEMENT AWARD, the nation’s highest Community Health Center award for excellence in clinical leadership from the National Association of Community Health Centers at an award ceremony held on August 29th.

Mr. Eggers was recognized for his sense of mission to ensure that the medically underserved portions of the world’s population have the opportunity to receive health care.

In addition to his medical career at Crusader, his earlier life was marked by creativity, energy and improvisation in circumstances that required them: in Papua, New Guinea and Africa where he set up bush clinics and worked in conflict zones. In Kazakhstan, where he trained rural physicians, and in rural Colorado where he set up and ran a community health center in a small town farmhouse. Eggers has worked to get medicine to the hardest-to-reach patients and deepened his commitment to first rate care for the under served back home.

It also put him in good stead at Crusader Community Health, where Eggers spent 18 years seeing patients as a PA before becoming President & CEO in 2005. In 1998 he was promoted to the executive management group as Vice President of Health Providers. He is insistent that all the services delivered to the clinic’s patient population be of the highest quality.

As CEO, Eggers oversees the care of 48,000 patients, 22,336 of them children. And a health care system with 206,000 visits last year. He has established multiple innovative programs and implemented numerous initiatives to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient care. Under Egger’s leadership, Crusader Community Health has expanded to five clinic locations and is in the process of building a sixth location that will be opened in April 2017.

Eggers was honored as the American Academy of Physician Assistants Service to the Underserved Paragon Award in March 2007. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award, Baylor College of Medicine in December 2007 and the President’s Award—Illinois Academy of Physicians Assistant in October 2007.

Crusader Community Health is a community based, not-for-profit, Illinois Corporation, whose mission is to serve the Rock River Valley area with quality, primary health care for people in need. Crusader Community Health established in 1972, has five locations and offers a sliding discount for covered services.