Caring for Carolina

CEO dedicated to healthcare in his adopted home state

Robert Greczyn

Robert Greczyn reads to a group of children at the Genesis Home in Durham.

Long before Robert Greczyn was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, he was an 18-year-old driving from New Jersey to North Carolina to begin his freshman year of college. The year was 1969 and like most college freshmen at the time, Greczyn had never taken visits to prospective colleges. He never spoke with recruiters. He never watched a promotional video.

He read a brochure and decided East Carolina University was where he would enroll. The first time he saw the campus was the day he arrived in Greenville. For the teenager from New Jersey, North Carolina was a strange place.

“The hot dogs were bright red and there was a foreign substance called barbecue,” Greczyn says.

It was definitely not a case of love at first sight. There was a long period of adjustment, but a summer spent exploring the natural beauty of the state and the friendly nature of its people converted Greczyn.

“One summer I drove around the mountains and the coast and that was it for me,” Greczyn says. “The diversity of the geography and the people captured me.”

Tragedy struck while Greczyn was at East Carolina University. His mother, a nurse, passed away. The loss forced Greczyn to re-evaluate his own life. He decided he wanted to follow in his mother's footsteps and pursue a career in healthcare.

The decision to apply at the School of Public Health was easy. Greczyn wanted to pursue a Master's of Public Health degree in Health Policy and Administration, and UNC-Chapel Hill was one of the best schools in the nation. Getting accepted, however, was a little more difficult.

“Chapel Hill was my first and only choice because of the School of Public Health,” Greczyn says. “It was then, and still is, a high quality program. But getting in was not the easiest thing in the world. I was first on the wait list and was accepted right before classes started. Not sure how I would pay tuition, I lived on a friend's couch for a couple of months while working and studying.”

Eventually, Greczyn received a U.S. Health Service grant and a student loan and was able to stop worrying about the tuition bill and focus on his classes. Though he finished his course work on time, work obligations kept him from completing his thesis until several years later.

“It was a lot of hard work, I will tell you that,” Greczyn says. “But my master's degree was the ticket to the party. It was the credential I needed to be considered for certain jobs, but it was also the experience that informed my thinking.”

With graduate school behind him, Greczyn decided to stay in his adopted home state and work to make a difference in the lives of North Carolinians.

“I built and ran a community health center in Anson County in rural North Carolina,” Greczyn says. “To start a community health center from scratch was a wonderful experience. It taught me about primary care and the people of North Carolina. At that point, I had already fallen in love with North Carolina, but after four years at the health center, there was no way I was moving back to New Jersey.”

As the head of the state's largest health insurer, Greczyn leads an organization that has a substantial impact on the economic health of the state and the physical well-being of its citizens. The company has annual revenues of more than $5 billion dollars and insures more than 3.7 million North Carolinians, a third of the state's population. It also provides jobs to 4,900 residents of the state.

Greczyn appreciates the impact a graduate degree has had upon his own life and has worked to make that opportunity available to the employees of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

“We have established a relationship with the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Public Health so that we can offer a master's degree on our campus,” Greczyn says. “We also offer a variety of other degrees, ranging from a Master of Business Administration to an associate degree.”

Greczyn's leadership philosophy is professionally grounded in the formative experience of his time at Carolina and personally guided by the example of his nurse mother: It is a belief in the importance of quality healthcare and dedicated service.

“I have always sought to lead from a healthcare perspective first,” Greczyn says. “I view almost everything we do from the vantage point of how it will help our customers become healthier, and that is the kind of thinking I want all of our employees to embrace. We are a company with revenues of more than $5 billion a year, so running a financially sound and sustainable business is a big part of my job, but I have always believed that if we are a true healthcare resource for our customers, the rest will follow.”

• J. Todd Brantley