Dr. Vicente Resto is a man untied to a plan.
He wasn’t always that way. The Chief Physician Executive for Faculty Group Practice and Senior Vice President for Health System Ambulatory Operations and Surgical Services used to know where he was going.
Then Hurricane Ike hit in 2008 and changed everything.
At the time, he was a junior faculty member who had opened a research lab and started to generate funding in support of his work developing models to study tumor spread to lymph nodes and establishing advanced surgical programs.
“I thought my career was going to be one of continuation that would allow me to promote as a professor locally but, importantly, would allow me also a way to engage at a regional, national and international level,” he said.
“I was going to be an expert in what I did and that perhaps my career would transition all the way through to professor rank,” he added, “and I would retire as a department chair of some highly regarded organization.”
At the same time, the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery was in the middle of a chair search that was interrupted by Ike, and Resto found himself stepping into an interim leadership role in the middle of a crisis.
He could have taken one of several offers from other academic health centers that came his way that would have taken him out of Galveston in pursuit of his planned path, but he accepted the role here and the rest, as they say, is history.
“It’s amazing what you can do when you have a group of individuals that are young, highly skilled and trained, energetic and—perhaps as important as all the above—naive and unafraid to try things that appear good. We did a lot of that, and it worked,” he said.
Keeping that department operating and advancing during the chaos that was Ike is one of Resto’s greatest professional accomplishments, he said.
“Since then,” he said, “I don’t have a plan to do or be anything. I just solve problems as they may present and pursue opportunities as they arise.”
Maybe that’s why he’s so chill. Or is he?
Asked for his favorite saying, Resto phoned a friend. The consensus: “Can I get that yesterday?”
It’s believed if you really want to know what makes a person tick, ask him or her their favorite song. Resto’s is “Now We Are Free,” a hauntingly beautiful song featured in the movie “Gladiator.”
“It soothing. It’s powerful,” Resto said. “I'm not someone who needs a lot of cranking to get energized,” he said. “I think I live in a generally energized state. I need the opposite.”
‘A really fun job’
Resto, admittedly, doesn’t spend much time thinking about himself.
What he does think a whole lot about is UTMB. That’s because UTMB gives him a whole lot to think about.
In his role, he oversees the university’s multispecialty practice as well as UTMB Health’s clinic operations and surgical and procedural areas.
That means, Resto explains, “I worry about programs and program development. I worry about recruitment and retention. I worry about operational efficiencies and productivity. I worry about market dynamics and growth.”
And that doesn’t even fully cover it all. That’s a lot of worry.
But it’s a “worry” he happily and enthusiastically embraces.
Resto went into medicine because he wanted to do something that was technically and intellectually challenging and had a positive impact on people’s lives.
“Ultimately, I wound up on the business administration and leadership side, and what I love about it is that it still allows me to participate in the concept of delivering quality care but now at a much larger scale,” he said.
“I've been blessed with the ability to contribute to solutions in collaboration with a bunch of really smart colleagues here at UTMB, sometimes flipping between mentor roles and colleague roles,” he added. “It's kind of fluid, and perhaps that has contributed to what I would describe as a really fun job.”
Of heroes and mentors
Speaking of mentors, Resto doesn’t have any. At least not anyone specific. He tends to look to different people for different things.
He also doesn’t have any heroes, again not in the traditional sense.
“I notice more heroic things that individuals may have done, whether mythical or in real life, but I don't necessarily personalize it as much,” he said.
To Resto, heroism is, in its most dramatic sense, “doing things altruistically.”
“And to me, the largest altruism is something done with risk or potential harm to self that is nonetheless delivered in the name of benefit for others,” he said. “Perhaps that's the thing of superheroes.”
More realistically, he describes heroism as things people do that go above and beyond the standard description of their responsibility and job—perhaps even unexpectedly so or just so far outside the expected range of function that they're notable.
“What I don't necessarily consider heroic is someone doing that which they were expected to do as they're expected to do it,” he said. “No one is asked to do anything poorly, so doing something well is not heroic. That’s what I expect of myself as well as others.”
Inspiration
Resto finds inspiration in his children who, he said, inspire him daily to be a supportive parent in every way and “offer them all kinds of opportunities that I not only didn't have but never even thought were available, period.”
Professionally, he’s inspired by the work being done at UTMB.
"Understanding that we are taking care of patients in ways that are going to allow them to live better is a worthwhile goal,” he said.
“When you come in and park and you see people coming in and out of our organization and, in most cases, those people are receiving a service that is going to improve their life in some way— that's a worthwhile way to spend our time,” he added. “At least I feel it's a worthwhile way for me to spend my time.”