Catching up with… Jamie Shepherd
President and CEO, Shepherd Center
The Shepherd Center provides medical treatment, research and rehabilitation for people with spinal cord and brain injuries and neuromuscular conditions. Prior to taking the reins in 2024, Jamie Shepherd was president and COO of the award-winning hospital cofounded by his late father, late grandfather and grandmother, Alana Shepherd. These are edited highlights from an interview.
Photo credit: Daemon Baizan
Tell us about your new role as CEO.
We’ve had a great and smooth transition. Sarah Morrison, our previous CEO, said around last November that she was going to retire, so we had nine months to plan everything. I was president and COO before, and we changed it to president and CEO. Shari McDowell, who has been here for a long time as program director for our Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Rehabilitation program, assumed that role of COO. And then Steve Holleman, who was our CFO and had been here for nearly 30 years, retired in July. We hired Beth Boatwright of Emory University School of Medicine, and she’s been fantastic. … Sarah and Steve [had] 68 years of combined service at the Shepherd Center that’s hard to replace, but we feel confident with the team we got in place.
How do you plan to build on the foundation your family established?
I grew up around the place. I helped with fundraising events and came to work at times with dad. My grandmother is almost 95 and comes in every day! She still greets all the patients and knows most of them. [Medical Director Emeritus Dr. David] Apple is still here. is still here. Each of them has their different style, as do I, and I’m certainly not trying to be like any of them. I’m a … business and finance person. I also have an understanding from growing up around Dad – with his spinal cord injury – that we are not just a numbers place. Rather, we are a “do what’s right for the patient” place first and worry about the numbers and the money second. Our people are what set us apart. We have some amazing staff who go above and beyond for our patients. It’s having that firsthand experience from growing up around Dad that helps differentiate us. I want to help maintain that. It … makes our culture unique.
How does your background in community service and risk management impact your new role?
Across the country there are only 15,000 to 20,000 spinal cord injuries a year. So it’s a very small population. Because it is such an underserved population, there are just not a lot of people who know [how] to medically take care of these folks. From a community perspective, they’ve historically been abandoned. Obviously, the passage of the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] … was a huge deal. We see ourselves as not only a medical treatment hospital, but also as advocates for the disability population at large. For instance, we do health and community wellness events in surrounding states. … You don’t have to be a Shepherd patient to attend.
What research and educational initiatives is the Shepherd Center involved with?
We have a large educational offering online. Our prevention program director visits schools and talks about the importance of things like not texting and driving, wearing a seatbelt, not diving headfirst into a lake – those types of things.
From a research perspective, we are very proud to be one of 12 to [16] model systems across the country for brain injury and spinal cord injury, which are separate applications. That’s a big deal in the research community.
What’s planned for the Shepherd Center’s 50th anniversary?
We started with humble beginnings. We leased six beds at that time and didn’t even have a spot to call ours. Now we are licensed for 152 beds and have an expansion plan campaign … with the ability to increase to 200 beds.
We’ve got lots of celebrations planned this year. We have a specialty license plate through the Department of Motor Vehicles. We’ll be celebrating with some of our stakeholders and employees, of course. And we have a new 50th anniversary coffee table book coming out.
It’s just been our mission to … help this population … and so we’re happy to be the best in the Southeast, and I would argue best in the country, to be able to take good care of these folks. 
