Healthcare Executive · Plattsburgh, New York
Healthcare executive, founder, and real estate developer. For twenty years he built and ran Plattsburgh Health Center — four sites, more than a hundred staff, over three hundred patient visits a day. He also directed nephrology and dialysis operations, ran a diagnostic imaging center, and advised a primary care group. From 2016 to 2025, his consulting work — plain-English reviews of budgets and books for towns, hospitals, medical practices, law firms, and other organizations — was done 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 its operations and finances. Within the Plattsburgh building he also ran the group's imaging center, with CAT scan and mobile MRI services. A physician assistant by training (MPAS, Albany Medical College, 1995), he practiced in primary care — with extensive orthopedics in his practice — having begun his career in radiologic technology and orthopedics.
At Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital, under Presidents Kevin J. Carroll and Stephens C. Mundy, he was pivotal in establishing the hospital'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) — not a conventional collection agency: a healthcare financial recovery and patient advocacy agency that 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) — staffing, scheduling, and care coordination across three regional hospital partners and outpatient dialysis centers, serving high-risk renal patients. From 2016 to 2024 he was a senior management and operations executive at Advanced Healthcare Imaging in Plattsburgh, holding full responsibility for the imaging center's operations and finances — CT, portable MRI, ultrasound, and digital radiography — where patient wait times fell 25% while daily throughput rose. In the same years he served as a primary care medical consultant and executive advisor to PHG Primary Care in Plattsburgh, where the provider engagement programs he built raised staff retention 30%.
From 2016 to 2025, his consulting work was done with VIP LLC and Before The Audit LLC. His specialty was a personalized, plain-English review of an organization's own books — its 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 served CEOs and 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 service 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 he 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.
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 to everyday investors, the people Wall Street never explains anything to, through his site, TacticalOptions.guru. He was a founding member of a private, invitation-only think tank of Wall Street options traders — a group that met twice a week in New York City. Living in the North Country, he would not let the distance cost him his seat at that table: he flew from Burlington to New York City and back the same day to be in the room. His seasonality research — a study of stock and options behavior built on eleven years of market data — grew out of that work.