Matthew Miller
When Matthew Miller”™s friends were saving for co-ops in Manhattan, he was heading to Norway for three weeks.
Miller, the chief medical officer at Danbury Hospital, was a self-described public health services brat.
His father was a psychologist and his mother was a physicist. Miller was the oldest of five children.
He moved a great deal throughout his youth: born in Virginia and living in New Orleans, Texas, Maryland, Florida, Denver and even going to school in England for a year when he was 11.
“It started off my interest in culture and traveling and seeing how other people go about life,” said Miller.
His parent”™s finally settled in Albany, N.Y., when his father became the commissioner of mental health for New York state.
Miller attended Amherst College in Massachusetts and went through his medical school training at NYU. “I did my internal medicine training at Bellevue Hospital; that was a trip,” said Miller. “It was the old Bellevue.”
After serving as a pulmonologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the Harvard faculty, Miller came to Danbury Hospital in 1980 as the chief of the Pulmonary Department.
“Even back then I was blending the medical academic career with a need to not get to caught in a small environment,” said Miller. “I need balance, I always needed to travel and get away and see how other people lived and how other people did things; it was cleansing for me.”
Miller says he and his wife Tina generally take one large trip a year and a few smaller ones, though their definition of vacations and trips may differ from the Rorschach images of Disneyland and Hershey, Pa., the words connote
Miller had from his youth been a traveler and took a few months to travel Europe after college, but he didn”™t get the bug for remote locations until his duties sent him to China to teach in 1988.
“That opened me up to the broader sense of travel,” said Miller.
Miller and his wife began doing high-altitude trekking.
“I”™ve been to Nepal twice, trekking high mountain passes,” said Miller. “We do multiple days hiking carrying a pack, going up 16,000 and 17,000 feet, you”™re days and days from the nearest road.”
Miller has also been to India, the Swiss Alps, the mountains of Chile and Peru, and to game preserves in South Africa and Kenya.
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“Part of it is being away from everything else,” said Miller. “I like the remoteness of it in such small groups. The first time I went to Nepal, to be so many days away from civilization, we went five days without seeing another human being and three weeks seeing only Nepalese. There”™s something euphoric about high-altitude hiking, you do it multiple days and you feel like all the troubles that you deal with everyday you can escape from. You come back amazingly refreshed, that”™s what mountains do for me. It keeps me focused and energized and I come back with much more enthusiasm for what I do. Without that break, I get stale and caught up in small stuff.”
While their children Nathaniel and Catherine were growing up, the Millers found it harder to travel out of the U.S. Miller, not deterred from his love for travel, has journeyed to 48 of the 50 states.
“I haven”™t made it to Alaska and North Dakota, yet,” said Miller.”We love the West. We had a house south of Santa Fe for a while, which we built. I”™d drag my kids out backpacking and hiking at an early age.”
Miller continues his active life even when at home, avidly rowing on the Housatonic River, running, cross-country skiing and practicing Tai Chi.
In the early ”™90s, Miller became very interested in quality of care and safety in the hospital, which led him into his current position as chief medical officer.
“It”™s fundamentally a job in which a doctor is responsible for the quality of the medical staff, and also quality of care in the hospital,” said Miller. “If you think of being safe in a hospital, you want freedom of preventable injury. To do that is tricky, you have all these checkpoints, it can be hard to orchestrate. My job is to make sure the medical staff works well with the hospital to coordinate this safe environment. In some ways, I”™m the man in the middle; it”™s a bridge I have to dance on and it”™s fascinating. The challenge is to make this hospital as good as it can be.”
Miller turned 60 a year and half ago and to celebrate he and his wife traveled to Africa and hiked Mt. Kenya.
“You get up to the top of this mountain and you can see forever,” said Miller. “Amazing ”“ what a great way to spend your 60th birthday.”
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