Get to Know Your Hospital - Steve Kroll

By Matthew Avitabile

COBLESKILL — This week we spoke to Steve Kroll, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cobleskill Regional Hospital. He is a retired healthcare executive who received a BA in Business Administration from the University at Buffalo and a MHA in Health Administration from Duke University. He is a lifelong New Yorker, living Upstate since 1996.

Kroll enjoys working with an “extraordinary group” of professionals and an “extraordinarily talented” group of trustees to provide quality healthcare to local residents.

He added that he's seen the “dramatic” change in rural health care over recent years. “It’s important for a hospital to be able to respond to the environment in which we are in and use our resources to ensure healthcare access for the community,” he said.

The trustee said that the board works hard to help meet the needs of residents of Schoharie County and surrounding communities.

This includes the creation of a primary care practice with the Bassett Healthcare Network on the hospital campus in recent years. The emergency department has also been expanded and renovated to “meet the needs of our community during emergencies.”

Last year, the hospital was named among the top 20 critical access hospitals in the country by the National Rural Health Association and Chartis Center for Rural Health. The hospital, along with Delhi’s O’Connor Hospital and Little Falls Hospital have the same critical access focus in the region. There are currently over 1,300 Critical Access Hospitals in the country. The award measured the quality of the care, patient satisfaction, and the financial sustainability of the hospital. Kroll said that the statistical analysis of the hospital was exceptional.

“It shows that our talented team of physicians, staff, and administrators have been successful in navigating a very complicated rural environment.”

Kroll said that the thing that is most special is the team of people at the hospital, which he says includes “incredible servants to our community”. These individuals offer a “healing environment” and give their all for people they know and those they never met. This includes a “tremendous group of people who keep the hospital facility running.”
In 2024, Cobleskill Regional Hospital was placed on Becker’s Hospital Review’s list of the cleanest hospitals in the U.S. with a five-star rating. “Everyone who works at the hospital takes such pride in what they do,” he said. “It makes you feel so good when the people, no matter what their job is in the hospital, are all about the patients.” Whether it’s care, cleanliness, therapy, or preparing food, “every single discipline on our team,” he said.

Kroll said that the hospital is always looking to improve. He cited a nationwide shortage of healthcare providers. Candidates for nearly every healthcare job are currently in “short supply,” especially in rural communities. He said that the Bassett hospitals need to attract individuals to our region’s health care facilities. He said that this was especially the case for attracting people to Schoharie County. The hospital has a strategy to bring in qualified individuals to our community to allow people to “access care quickly and close to home.”

He added that the hospital building itself is getting older. While there was a “top to bottom” rebuild of the emergency department, there could be more upgrades coming in the future. In early 2026, the hospital plans to install a state-of-the-art CT Scanner.

“We are taking great care of an older hospital building in Schoharie County,” he said. The hope would be that eventually the building itself could be substantially renovated or even rebuilt. Larger patient rooms could be especially helpful, he said.

“The challenge for small rural hospitals is how do we pay for those things?” he said.

“Our goal is to be more than just a hospital for emergencies,” said Kroll. He cited the primary care practice and how the primary care practitioners can send patients in need of tests right across the street to the hospital. Because of the hospital’s longstanding partnership with Bassett, it has many specialized services.

“We have so many specialty programs at the hospital,” he said. “You can come to us in an emergency, you can come to us if you need primary care, you can come to us for specialty care.”

This includes the ability to receive cancer treatment infusions locally. The trained oncology staff can provide chemotherapy, he said.

“Our goal is to offer as many services as possible close to home,” he said. This includes the knowledge that for many local and elderly residents, transportation is difficult.

“It’s not just what we do in Cobleskill, it’s our partnership with the larger Bassett Healthcare Network,” he said. This includes more than twenty School-Based Health Centers and the New York Center for Agriculture Medicine and Health (NYCAMH), which works improve health and safety in agriculture.

“That’s the power of all of us being in one network,” he said.