Discover how Paul Kusserow transformed a teetering home healthcare company into a national leader.

Learn actionable strategies focused on people, performance, and purpose to revitalize your organization.

An extraordinary business turnaround delivers actionable strategies for driving profit and growth in organizations in healthcare and beyond.

When Paul Kusserow began consulting for Amedisys, the home healthcare company was on the brink of collapse. Its stock had fallen to less than $11 per share, and it had to borrow money to pay a massive government fine. Six months later, Kusserow became its CEO. Under his leadership, Amedisys dramatically improved operations, increased its market capitalization by over tenfold, and took its place among the country’s top home care and hospice businesses.

In this inspiring in-depth case study, Kusserow explains how he achieved this stunning turnaround. In the process, he provides invaluable insights and lessons that you can use to breathe new life into your organization. Unlocking unrealized human potential that already exists within your company has the highest return of any and all strategic investments. Kusserow reveals the two key principles he relied on to turbocharge Amedisys’s human capital. First, recommitting the company to its core mission of caring for its patients. This moral imperative provides clarity and improves real-time decision-making. Second, and of equal importance, applying a Golden Rule managerial model. Treating employees well and listening intently to their observations and advice empowers them to go the extra mile for customers and patients. These twin governing principles were essential to improving care quality and outcomes, retaining and attracting staff, and enhancing organizational performance and profitability. Under Kusserow’s leadership, Amedisys reimagined and redefined the home care industry. Its people powered its transformation.

Kusserow details the life and leadership lessons he’s acquired through a diverse and sometimes tumultuous career. They provide the foundation for his four-stage framework―turnaround, stability, growth, and transformation―which enabled Amedisys to become the nation’s leading and most innovative home care company. It’s a proven framework that applies to business turnarounds in any industry.

What People Are Saying

  • “Lessons that will not only cultivate better business leaders but also nurture better human beings.”

    —from the Foreword by Senator Bill Frist, MD, former Majority Leader of the US Senate

  • “The lessons in this book are broadly applicable for anyone contemplating taking on an impossible job, fraught with risk, on which many are depending and for which the stakes are extremely high.”

    —Trevor Fetter, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and former Chairman and CEO of Tenet Healthcare Corporation

  • “Paul has been the leading voice in Washington for care in the home. This book chronicles not only the transformation of an amazing Baton Rouge–based company, but the necessity of driving more of our care out of institutions and into the home.”

    —Senator Bill Cassidy, MD

  • “During my time running CMS, Paul was a tireless advocate for driving more care into the home. He was right. His book explains why.”

    —Seema Verma, former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

  • “A true innovator, Paul sees things others don’t. The Anatomy of a Turnaround is about using basic principles that engage all in the act of caregiving and creating enormous value by tapping into that energy.”

    —Adam Boehler, CEO of Rubicon Founders Opportunity Fund and former Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI)

  • “Paul ran strategy for Humana during the last five years of my tenure as CEO. His vision, passion, and ability to innovate within the company and push us forward were extraordinary and key to helping us transform ourselves into the company we are today. His insightful book helps us understand the elements of transformative company building.”

    —Michael McCallister, Chairman of Zoetis and former Chairman and CEO of Humana

  • “It’s refreshing to see someone who relentlessly pushes a company to do what it should be doing: serving its people, so they can serve the customers. As a CEO myself, I've benefited from Paul's philosophies as applied to both my business and personal lives. I'm sure readers will feel the same way after finishing Paul’s insightful and entertaining book.”

    —Mike Pykosz, Chairman and CEO of Oak Street Health

  • “Paul is a force. His book is, too. He studies and learns from all angles, develops market-based strategies, divides the work so everyone has a piece, and then tracks relentlessly until he hits his goals. The results of this method have produced some amazing results.”

    —Sean Slovenski, CEO of Avesis Corporation and former President of Walmart Health

  • “By aligning the business mission to a passion for serving the most vulnerable and combining his business acumen with uncompromising execution, Paul has become a uniquely successful CEO. This book describes how you can take that journey as well.”

    —Sarah Ladd Eames, Managing Director at Russell Reynolds and Associates, cofounder of Roundtable for Healthcare CEOs, and former CEO of Allied Healthcare International

  • “Paul’s courageous moves in Amedisys’s early days—focusing on a few key things, rigorously tracking and measuring progress, and moving the fly wheel—showed what grit and intense strategic focus can do to drive operational performance.”

    —Jon Kaplan, Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group

  • “Paul is passionate and deeply knowledgeable, with an incredible sense of how things should be. He is one of the key people I turn to when trying to figure out where the puck is going. The Anatomy of a Turnaround outlines the orientation future seekers and change makers need to adopt to be transformative.”

    —Robb Vorhoff, Managing Director and Global Head of Healthcare at General Atlantic LLC

  • “Paul is one of the most original, broad-reaching minds I’ve encountered in the healthcare world. The Anatomy of a Turnaround is a fascinating study of how to transform healthcare and how to do it in an inclusive, empowering way for all.”

    —Jonathan Kolstad, Henry J. Kaiser Chair at the Haas Business School of the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of The Center for Healthcare at UC Berkeley Opportunity Lab

  • “Paul and I worked together at Humana and have remained close personally and professionally throughout the years. Like many others, I have benefited greatly from his support and informed counsel. He is a visionary. At Humana and elsewhere, Paul has driven transformation that created real and lasting value. His insights here serve as a testament and guide to driving compassionate, people-oriented leadership.”

    —Ken Fasola, President of Centene Corporation

  • “For me personally, participating in the extraordinary turnaround of Amedisys is one of the proudest moments of my business career. Paul is a terrific leader and even better person. His book tells our story of going all in on principled leadership.”

    —Nat Zilkha, cofounder and Executive Chairman of Firebird Music Holdings, Chairman of Gibson Brands, and former Partner at KKR Credit

  • “Paul and I spent many days on the road together during our time with The Advisory Board. His deep knowledge of healthcare and how it works, coupled with his passion for change and transformation, has made him one of the leading thinkers in healthcare today.”

    —Eric Larsen, President of Advisory Board Company

  • “Smart as heck, passionate, unrelenting, true to his vision, and irrepressible. Paul finally got his own show at Amedisys and proved the principles of compassion, the democratization of healthcare, service, and selfless attention to your constituencies and, specifically, to the customer experience will drive performance off the charts.”

    —Ralph Judah, former Senior Managing Director at Deloitte

  • “When Paul came along and showed the world what care in the home was and what it could be and should be, things changed. This book is a testament to how Paul helped transform our perceptions of home care.”

    —Brian Tanquilit, Healthcare Services Equity Research Analyst at Jefferies

  • "Paul’s results speak to the honest but hard work of listening to your markets and delivering value to your constituents. This book outlines how doing the right thing can lead to exceptional results.”

    —Larry Van Horn, PhD, Associate Professor of Management (Economics), Associate Professor of Law, and Executive Director for Health Affairs at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Center for Healthcare Market Innovation Research

Meet the Author

Paul Kusserow is Chairman and former CEO of Amedisys, a publicly traded company and leading provider of home health, hospice, palliative care, personal care, and high-acuity care services, with over 22,000 employees in 39 states and the District of Columbia, making over 12.3 million patient visits per year.

A healthcare veteran with 25 years of experience driving growth strategies, Kusserow served as Chairman of the Board of Amedisys prior to his return as CEO. From 2014 to early 2022, he was President and CEO of the company, which grew tenfold under his leadership. His hands-on involvement helped raise Amedisys in the ranks of home healthcare, moving from 3.2 stars to 4.6-star reviews. He is widely recognized as a thought leader and industry innovator.

Prior to joining Amedisys, Kusserow served in successive roles as President and Vice Chairman of Alignment Healthcare, Inc., an integrated clinical care company focused on providing care to the Medicare population; SVP and Chief Strategy, Innovations, and Corporate Development Officer of Humana, Inc., a Fortune 75 healthcare services and benefits company; and SVP of Strategy and Ventures at Tenet Healthcare, a Fortune 500 hospital and ambulatory surgery company.

He is on the boards of Oak Street Health (NYSE: OSH); PurFoods, a medical and nutritional food company; Matrix Medical Network, a Medicare risk-assessed company; Chairman of HealthPilot, a digitized Medicare enrollment company; and Scion, a hospital and LTACH company. He previously served on the boards of Connecture (Nasdaq: CNRX), New Century Health, Picwell, and Availity where he served as board chair. Kusserow started his career as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company.

He received his bachelor of arts from Wesleyan University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an Olin Fellow, a Brown Scholar, and a Student Fellow at the Center for the Humanities. He received his master of arts from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.