CLEVELAND, Ohio — Petite, blonde and young-looking, Dr. Beri Ridgeway is accustomed to people sizing her up and not taking her seriously.
“All my life, people have completely underestimated me, and that’s OK,” said Ridgeway, 47, who is a urogynecology specialist. “This is one of the reasons I am so interested in this position — to show people what can be done.”
What Ridgeway is doing now is making Cleveland Clinic history as its first female chief of staff. She will report directly to Clinic president and CEO Dr. Tom Mihaljevic as the hospital system’s second-in-command. She will be the top doctor for every clinical program in the Cleveland Clinic system, from transplants to cardiac, explained Dr. Tommaso Falcone, chief of staff at Cleveland Clinic London.
“People who underestimate her are going to be in trouble,” Falcone said. “It’s not like she came from obscurity. She has a long track record of being in leadership roles.”
She also has a reputation as one of the top ob-gyn surgeons in the country, he said.
Ridgeway leaves her current position as associate chief of staff to take up her new post on Jan. 1.
“Being the first female chief of staff honors the women physicians, scientists, and caregivers who paved the way for me,” Ridgeway said. “It solidifies our organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion and obliges me to create opportunities for those who will follow.”
Her leadership skills came to the fore during her residency at the University of California San Diego, recalled Dr. Charles Nager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UC San Diego who was one of Ridgeway’s faculty mentors.
“Beri was an excellent resident,” Nager said. “She was super smart and a very hard worker. She took great care of her patients. I’m not surprised she’s done so well.”
At the Clinic, Ridgeway became the first chairwoman of the Ob/Gyn and Women’s Health Institute in its history. Falcone, who held the position prior to Ridgeway, recognized the irony of men leading a department that exclusively serves women patients for so long.
Prior to the 1990s, there were few women specializing in ob-gyn, Falcone said. Now more female ob-gyns are climbing the ladder in hospital leadership.
“It just took that much time,” Falcone said. “She’s of that generation after me.”
Mihaljevic said he tapped Ridgeway to become chief of staff because she is a compassionate and highly skilled leader.
“In her role as Associate Chief of Staff, she led the organization through the reactivation of services during the COVID-19 pandemic while also serving as chair of the Women’s Health Institute,” Mihaljevic said in an email. “Her dedication to making Cleveland Clinic the best place to work in healthcare shows her commitment to her colleagues throughout the enterprise and will pave the way for the future of our organization.”
Once she steps into her new role, Ridgeway’s goals include continuing the Clinic’s focus on patient-centered care, and creating a workplace where all can succeed. She will coordinate how the Clinic’s physicians meet their clinical work, teaching and research responsibilities, while also achieving their personal and professional goals.
She will also help oversee the hospital system’s response to COVID-19. This spring, as associate chief of staff, she helped oversee the Clinic’s ban on non-essential surgery due to the pandemic.
Ridgeway wants to promote workplace flexibility so that physicians, especially women, can choose to work full time, part time, or on a nontraditional, flexible schedule. Some doctors may prefer to hold office hours after 5 p.m. for patients who want late-day appointments, she said.
“That has not been a tradition in medicine,” Ridgeway said about flexible scheduling. “That would help a great number of people.”
Ridgeway will work closely with Dr. Donald Malone Jr., who was recently named the Clinic’s President of Ohio Hospitals and Family Health Centers. The Clinic also recently announced that Dr. Serpil Erzurum, chair of the Lerner Research Institute, is taking on the newly created role of Chief Research and Academic Officer.
Ridgeway joined the Clinic in 2009 as a staff physician in the obstetrics and gynecology department. Currently she leads the Clinic’s Women’s Health Institute, a role she’ll leave at the first of the year.
She intends to keep seeing patients and performing surgeries after she steps up as chief of staff. As a specialist in urogynecology and reconstructive pelvic surgery, she focuses on disorders that affect women’s bladder, reproductive organs, rectum and pelvic floor muscles.
Currently she performs between 80 and 100 surgeries annually, but she will decrease her case load as chief of staff. Ridgeway enjoys improving the quality of life for her patients, mostly women past their childbearing years who have dedicated their lives to their families. “I help them live life to the fullest,” she said.
Ridgeway grew up in San Diego, California, where her father’s paramedic career sparked her interest in medicine.
By the time she reached college, her resolve to study medicine wavered. Her experiences living with a family in Quito, Ecuador, made her consider a career in some type of foreign service, but she realized she would regret not pursuing medicine.
Instead, Ridgeway took what she learned in Ecuador — the feeling of being a minority in her Ecuadorean community, and the compassion that her hosts extended to her — and uses it constantly as a reminder to extend compassion to others.
She earned a medical degree from the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine in 2002, and took a urogynecology fellowship at the Clinic in 2006. She still recalls the muggy summer day when she first saw Cleveland.
“It was so green. I loved the history of the city,” she said.
During her free time, Ridgeway enjoys hiking, biking in the Cleveland Metroparks, swimming and boating. She lives in the western suburbs with her husband Robert and their three elementary school-age children.
“They’re amazing,” she said about her kids. “They inspire me to continue to do better.”