Healthcare Executive · Plattsburgh, New York
Healthcare executive and founder — an operations executive first, whose management work has reached well beyond healthcare, into environmental health and safety, real estate development and rental housing, and the budgets and operations of towns and other organizations. A leader and organizer who prided himself on teamwork, he has led large teams of staff and volunteers alike — across multi-site practices, imaging and dialysis operations, housing, and community and volunteer organizations. For twenty years he built and ran Plattsburgh Health Center — four sites, more than a hundred staff, over three hundred patient visits a day, with full profit-and-loss and capital-budget responsibility, its own surgery center and diagnostic imaging center, and physicians across the specialties. He directed nephrology and dialysis operations at Renal Associates and advised primary care groups. From 2016 to 2024 he was a senior management and operations executive at Advanced Healthcare Imaging and a primary care medical consultant and executive advisor to PHG Primary Care, alongside consulting work with VIP LLC and Before The Audit LLC.
Thomas A. Cross founded Plattsburgh Health Center in 1995 and served as its Chief Executive Officer for twenty years, growing it to four sites — Plattsburgh, Dannemora, Peru, and Chazy — with full responsibility for operations and finances. The Plattsburgh building housed the health center's own surgery center and its own diagnostic imaging center, offering CAT scan and mobile MRI services. He worked alongside physicians across the specialties — primary care physicians, internists, hospitalists, neonatal intensive care physicians, orthopedic surgeons, and other specialists. A physician assistant by training (MPAS, Albany Medical College, 1995), he practiced in primary care with extensive work in orthopedics, having begun his career in radiologic technology.
Working in conjunction with Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital during the administrations of Presidents Kevin J. Carroll and Stephens C. Mundy — not as a hospital employee, but for the furtherance of the community — he was pivotal in establishing CVPH's hospitalist program with Dr. Jaroslaw J. Fedorowski, and he helped start and volunteered in the hospital's Women's Health program, a community outreach effort staffed by volunteer providers.
Alongside the practice, he founded and ran the Patient First Resolution Collection Agency in Plattsburgh (1995–2015) — a healthcare financial recovery and patient advocacy agency, not a conventional collection agency. It worked gently with people — educating them on their finances and setting up payment plans they could keep — recovering accounts receivable while preserving patient relationships.
His operations work in those years ran well beyond one building. He directed nephrology operations at Renal Associates in Plattsburgh (2012–2016), overseeing staffing, scheduling, and care coordination across three regional hospital partners and outpatient dialysis centers serving high-risk renal patients. From 2016 to 2024, as a senior management and operations executive at Advanced Healthcare Imaging in Plattsburgh, he held full responsibility for operations and finances across CT, portable MRI, ultrasound, and digital radiography; patient wait times fell 25% while daily throughput rose. In the same years, as a primary care medical consultant and executive advisor to PHG Primary Care, he built provider engagement programs that raised staff retention by 30%.
From 2016 to 2025 he also consulted through VIP LLC and Before The Audit LLC. That consulting was adjunct work, done alongside — never instead of — his management of medical practices, which continued throughout those years. His specialty: a personalized, plain-English review of an organization's own books — budgets compiled and read the way an owner reads them: where every dollar goes, what has drifted, and what to fix first. The work began with towns and grew to medical practices and hospitals, and it serves chief executives anywhere the books need a clear-eyed read — law firms and other professional groups among them.
His background also includes formal training and long practice in environmental health and safety: OSHA, ANSI, and EPA compliance; workplace inspection and accident investigation; and workers' compensation — evaluating claims and medical evidence, building return-to-work programs, and serving as an expert medical witness in Workers' Compensation Board proceedings, work that draws directly on his clinical training. He has written safety manuals and emergency action plans, and completed executive leadership training at the Disney Institute focused on employee safety and workers' compensation.
Alongside the healthcare career, he has spent twenty-five years buying, renovating, and selling North Country real estate — apartment houses and other properties across Clinton and Essex Counties, bought and sold in his own name. During the Plattsburgh Health Center years he also owned Five Star Properties LLC, a real estate company kept separate from the medical practice. His commercial real estate work, including the large rental portfolio he bought from John D. Murray of Jay, is set out on its own page: Thomas A. Cross — Commercial Real Estate.
He also held a Federal Firearms License and owned a sporting goods shop with his father, Mark B. Cross. As an instructor at the Chesterfield Fish and Game Club in Keeseville, he trained children and adults to earn their firearms safety certification.
He also traded options on stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and taught options trading in plain language — through his site, TacticalOptions.guru — to everyday investors, the people Wall Street never explains anything to. A founding member of a private, invitation-only think tank of Wall Street options traders that met twice a week in New York City, he flew from Burlington to New York and back the same day rather than let the distance cost him his seat at that table. His seasonality research — a study of stock and options behavior built on eleven years of market data — grew out of that work.