- This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] - What would you do if you were diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition or you needed highly skilled surgery?

Would you leave town and head to a big city health center?

Well, not that long ago, many people would say yes and head out of town.

But over the past two generations, Tampa Bay's health care system has transformed to include world class hospitals, research institutions, and specialty centers with physicians and staff who are among the highest ranked in the nation.

In this special program, we're going to introduce you to three of the leading health care CEOs in Tampa Bay.

Next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial well-being first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

[music] - The largest health care system in Tampa Bay is BayCare.

It serves about one third of all health care consumers.

Tampa General serves about 20%, and Moffitt Cancer Center serves a smaller but very specialized population in need of state-of-the-art cancer care.

The average consumer of health care in the U.S.

spends over $15,000 a year.

All three of these leading health care institutions are laser focused on patient care.

Tampa General Hospital CEO John Couris knows it's a competitive health care market.

- A lot of consumers shop.

They go online.

They look at different hospitals.

They look at different physician offices, and they have choices.

And one way they make their choice is based on rankings like U.S.

News & World Report.

So it's important from a consumer-facing perspective.

It's also important because it represents the rigor that we go through every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to literally be the best.

We have a very clear vision at Tampa General Hospital, and that's to be the safest and most innovative academic health system in the country.

Awards like U.S.

News & World Report, or recognition like we get from U.S.

News & World Report is important.

It's a testament to the work that our physicians, our nurses, our clinicians, our board members do every single day in the relentless pursuit of excellence.

- BayCare CEO Stephanie Connors says it's vital to provide health care consumers a multitude of choices and locations.

- BayCare has deep roots in the communities that we serve.

We have 34,000 people that care for this community.

Our team members live and work in the community, and when you think about the numbers that choose us 1 in 3 that's a pretty big number.

When you look at health care across the ecosystem.

We have our 17th hospital being built.

Currently, we're in five counties, and with that, we also have hundreds of outpatient facilities.

So over 400 touchpoints where you can access the BayCare health care system to ensure that you get that continuity of care and the compassionate care that we're known for.

- Moffitt Cancer Center is the only National Cancer Center hospital in Florida, according to Moffitt CEO Dr.

Patrick Hwu.

Its reputation for world class cancer care is growing.

- Well, I knew about Moffitt Cancer Center because I was a science adviser.

I was on their science board for eight years prior.

So for eight years, I was coming to Tampa, and I knew this was an amazing place.

And a lot of cancer aficionados out there really know about Moffitt Cancer Center, but is not a known name brand in the lay public like MD Anderson or Sloan-Kettering.

And so that's why I think it's the best kept secret.

It's one that has incredible science.

Tampa Bay should be very proud of Moffitt Cancer Center and what was built.

And only 35 years, to one of the top cancer centers in the nation.

- How does Moffitt differ from some of the other prominent centers in the U.S.?

- Well, we are the only one in Florida.

And so that is important because Florida has 45,000 cancer deaths every year.

And so there's a huge need in the state of Florida.

It's the second most in the whole country of cancer deaths.

So we really need to to cover Florida and make sure that people can get outstanding care today and even better care tomorrow through our research.

- All three of these institutions are capitalizing on the growth in west central Florida.

The surge in population during COVID 19 provided a big boost.

Now that the pandemic surge is over, BayCare continues to build momentum.

- We were coming out of the pandemic, and the interesting thing about BayCare is they were laser focused on the pandemic.

They weren't really thinking about where are we going to grow next?

How much are we going to spend that whole growth mindset?

It was all around ensuring that the community was safe from the pandemic, but we had a lot of individuals entrance coming into our community.

So we're the largest health care system, and all of a sudden you're starting to see all these competitors entering in.

And although my original statement is there's enough health care for all of us, I still believe that.

But there is a time where it can get saturated.

And the market that we have, if we don't fill in those gaps, somebody else will fill them in, right?

Naturally, you would expect that.

So we had a growth opportunity.

What we did was the first thing was we presented to the board of the billions of dollars of opportunity that we have in West central Florida, and we made a commitment to spend over $2.9 billion in filling in the gaps for the community to live that vision where no patient would have to leave their community for care.

We realized we had opportunities.

One particular was in Manatee County.

Manatee County had no not for profit health care.

That community really needed BayCare.

So we made an incredible investment to build a hospital.

That's our 17th hospital.

At the same time, we are the largest provider of children's services Pediatrics BayCare kids.

We serve the most children in west central Florida.

So we made an investment to build a freestanding children's hospital, which will go live in 2030.

So our goal is to not only fill in gaps with freestanding emergency rooms and our ambulatory surgical centers and our physicians throughout the community so that we have access, which is very important.

You shouldn't have to wait for a doctor's appointment.

So improving access is critical.

We also have infrastructure.

- Tampa General Hospital is increasing its focus on community services.

- Through a series of joint ventures, unique and innovative partnerships, and building some of our own facilities.

We've grown our platform to 44 locations.

We are now in Pinellas County, we're in Pasco County, and clearly we're in Hillsborough County where our where our majority of our work is.

We're also down in Fort Myers.

We're partnering with Lee Health.

We have a transplant program down there where we're taking care of patients pre and post-operatively right there in their communities.

So our footprint is expanding because people want to stay local, particularly for sort of the basic work that most of us need, right?

There's not, you know, when you are sick and you need sophisticated, complex work done.

You want to go to a place like Tampa General Hospital.

People will travel for that kind of work.

But when you're going to your primary care doctor, when you need an imaging study, when you have you want to go to an urgent care center because you've got a cold or your, your child has has the flu, you want to go close to home.

So we're expanding the footprint, going to where people live and where people work and making accessing Tampa General convenient and easy and less expensive.

- Tampa General Hospital is a private, nonprofit institution.

It's also a safety net hospital.

- How is it different from other hospitals in the area?

- We are here for everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of their socioeconomic situation.

When you cross over the threshold of Tampa General Hospital on Davis Island, you get treated with world class health care.

A great example of that is if you go into the northern part of our city on 30th Street, we have, um, we have Health Park.

Health Park is a multidisciplinary clinic in partnership with USF.

We own it.

Tampa General owns it.

Between Health Park and our and our Kennedy location last year we saw over 100,000 visits of under and uninsured patients.

That's an example of a deep connection to the community.

It's an example of being a safety net hospital.

TGH is critically important to the community.

We know that we were created by the community, for the community and those that bond stays very strong to this to this day.

So as a safety net, we have a responsibility to everyone.

- Moffitt Cancer Center is also expanding clinical services.

- It's critical that we get to as many people as possible, and we just can't do it on our current campus.

And so we are developing a network of clinics around the area.

We're going into St.

Pete, we're going into South Hillsborough to Pasco County with clinics so that we can expand our footprint and treat more patients.

And the other thing that that does is it allows patients, you know, who are not feeling their best, they're undergoing cancer care.

They might be nauseated, they might be tired.

We're trying to take the medicines closer to them so they don't have to drive every day across the bridge and back to get their radiation.

Sometimes they have to come every day, five days a week, for six weeks.

So we want to get this closer to their home.

So that's the goal.

So we're building and that is it's fun.

It's exciting.

It's also challenging.

- Moffitt also has some pretty ambitious plans for Pasco County in the future.

- Yes.

We have 750 acres, uh, north off the Veterans Expressway where we really want to develop a cutting-edge life sciences park.

We're very excited about this.

We're starting with a science building and a clinical outpatient building as our first campfire, as we say.

And but it's going to have companies, we're already signing up companies to come in.

It's going to be a lot of blend of academia and biotechnology.

And hopefully we can really become a real leader in biotechnology.

So when someone says the Bay Area for biotechnology.

They think of Tampa Bay.

- Training health care professionals for the future is the key to managing growth and providing state of the art health care.

- So when you look at health care and physicians of the future, if you don't train the physician of the future, you have risk.

We had the opportunity to have 650 residents, but we didn't fill those slots.

When I arrived, a clock had started and we had about three years to fulfill the application to get those residents in place.

So I looked at my chief physician executive and I said, fill every position.

We're going to grow our residency program.

That was our start.

So now we're anticipated to have the 650 residents by 2029.

We have over 500, almost 600 approved.

And in place, we have over 330, I believe, that are actually on site.

You take that from three years ago where we had a handful of residents.

So our first, I would say action was train the future If we train the future with this amazing foundation, we have incredible physicians.

That's why 1 in 3 choose us.

That's why we're known as a leading health care system, and our outcomes are what they are today.

So the vision was no patient would have to leave the community, let alone the state for care.

So we wanted to fill in that gap.

That's when we built the relationship with northwestern.

Our goal is that we continue to advance our organization, to take care of every aspect of care that would be necessary for our population.

- We are considered in the industry a comprehensive academic medical center.

And what that means is we have over 700 residents and fellows over 60 training programs.

A deep commitment to education, a deep commitment to research, and our medical school relationship is very, very important to us.

Um, USF has got a history of excellence.

They've come a very, very long way and their medical school is outstanding.

They produce great physicians.

A lot of our private practice physicians, for example, that are on our medical staff because our medical staff's divided 50 50, it's 50% university physicians and 50% private practice physicians.

And we have a very deep commitment to our private practice physicians as well as our university doctors.

A lot of our private practice doctors were trained at USF.

- Science, technology and innovation are a vital part of health care.

Moffitt Cancer Center is pioneering cancer treatment breakthroughs.

- We are learning so much science every day, and we are understanding how the immune system is attacking cancer, really all the mechanisms and molecules involved in that.

And we're also understanding how to block the circuitry of a cancer cell with pills.

So with those two emerging areas of science.

The death rate is now starting to decrease at 600,000.

It's leveling off at 600,000 deaths in this country every year.

And I think it's going to continue to go down as we apply this great science to people.

If you want to look at one place where we really have a reputation and lead the field, it's immunotherapy.

It's stimulating the body's immune system against cancer.

It's my own personal field that I've studied for over 30 years.

And specifically it's T-cell therapy.

What is T-cell therapy?

Well we have these incredible cells in our body, some of which fight viruses like Covid.

They're called T cells.

But when these T cells can touch a cancer cell, does what I call the kiss of death.

It secretes enzymes and kills that cancer cell.

Then the T cell can go to the next cancer cell.

Kill that cancer cell.

At Moffitt Cancer center we've learned to take these T cells out of the body, put genes in to help them recognize the cancer.

Take genes out through CRISPR technology.

That we're doing in the lab to try to make them even better soldiers and then put them back in.

And this is what we do.

One of the technologies is called CAR-T therapy, where we take chimeric antigen receptors, put those into the T cells to help them recognize the cancer.

We've treated over 600 patients at Moffitt Cancer Center with CAR-T therapy.

Almost no other center in the world has done that many patients.

That means not only are we on the cutting edge of the research, but we also can deal with the toxicities.

Everyone on the team is so tuned in to all the multiple toxicities that could happen.

So we can really make it a much safer treatment as well.

So that's one of the areas and it gives me a lot of pleasure because we worked on that technology at the NIH in the early 90s.

And so now to see it over 30 years later is very fulfilling for me.

- Moffitt Cancer Center is also developing biotech companies to bring new treatments to market.

- We're not for profit, but we do start for-profit entities because in some ways, that's the best way to take studies from the lab into the clinic and to really shorten that time, because there's still 600,000 deaths.

We need to shorten that time.

And using biotechnology and entrepreneurship, that's really a way to shorten that time.

Jen was our first attempt at that.

It was when we realized Bill Dalton realized he was the CEO at the time that, um, medicine should be personalized, that we really need to understand the genes that cause cancer.

And if you understood that, you could develop drugs.

And so that was what M2Gen was.

And it's still going on.

Uh, the other, uh, for profits that we've started are, uh, CRO, a research organization to try to help everybody do trials in immunotherapy.

It's called OncoBay.

So that's really helping a lot of entities, both companies and academic centers around the country now, uh, do clinical trials and clinical research.

And that's, uh, we're going to start others as well and work really closely in entrepreneurially with the community.

And we hope to build a biotech community right here in Tampa Bay.

We've already started at TGH.

- The focus is on improving processes and controlling costs.

- TGH is on 25 acres.

It's 3,000,000 ft.

If we include everything on that campus, we are a large academic facility that's almost a hundred years old.

We've got a ton of opportunity in improving our processes and improving our systems, driving quality up and lowering cost.

So I was really attracted to some of the work that GE has been doing.

They started doing this probably about 3 or 4 years ago, and they did it with Johns Hopkins and a system up in Canada, actually outside of Toronto called Humber River.

And what they were doing is they were using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics and building what they call command centers.

And the command center was a was a center filled with technology that allowed those hospitals to view their entire enterprise from a 360-degree view, real time on what was happening with their patients, what were happening with systems in their organization.

And they were leveraging technology to improve quality and drive down cost.

And so we engaged GE.

We, we, we did the deal.

We we invested about $13 million into the center.

Um, we have invested in teams of people, you know, industrial engineers that sit behind the analytics and re-engineer our work.

And we started to really take a look at our processes, our patient throughput, for example, through our re-engineering efforts through using artificial intelligence, um, we were able to lower the length of stay in one year by a half a day.

That's a lot that getting people out a half a day earlier is a really good thing.

Now, you don't want to have a patient leave too early, but you also don't want a patient to stay unnecessarily too long either.

You got to find the right balance for your hospital by reducing the length of stay by a half a day.

We took $10 million of inefficiency out of the system in the last ten months.

- BayCare health system is trading bricks-and-mortar for new ways to provide personalized health care.

- Ultimately, I don't believe that bricks and mortar are the future of health care.

We also are building out our virtual hospital to ensure that when patients can stay home and be with their loved ones, that we're caring for them in their home.

Think about the future of health care.

There's this metaverse out there right now and in the future.

Imagine being in your living room knowing that maybe a couple years prior you would be in the hospital, but you're being cared for because you have all the patient monitoring on you that's being monitored by the health care professionals, and you're actually talking to your physician that you feel is in your living room, but they're in a virtual space.

That's the future of health care.

And how do we prepare for that?

So it's not only bricks and mortar, but it's care from home.

And how do you care for that patient in the home or the most acute in your most acute environments, which is why we're building out our academic mission.

- Most hospital CEOs are professional business managers.

Many are doctors.

But BayCare's Stephanie Connors' path to leadership started with nursing.

- As a nurse, you have the mindset of doing the impossible and creating a better life, not only for those that you're serving, but those that are around you.

And as a leader, it's the same thing.

So I would say as a leader, being a nurse really prepared me to take care of people at a scale that I do today so that they could take care of the community.

And it is the blessing that, you know, most people don't realize nurses have financial acumen, they have tremendous skills, but they have that compassion and that focus on what's most important.

So you wrap all of that together and you have amazing outcomes.

It's when I was going through the journey, I used to think as I was fulfilling other people's visions, if I was able to lead in a way that gave people the runway to be the best of themselves and to set up a standard which was we're here to serve and we're here to serve with the highest safety, service and quality.

The financials come with it.

That I would prove that all of those things are important to have strong financial out, you know, and output.

And I'm living that.

So you learn it as a nurse because as a nurse you have to learn that skill.

And then when you're a leader, you help everybody else learn it.

- Dr.

Patrick Hwu, relies heavily on teamwork.

- The most important component, though, is to have an incredible team.

And I have an incredible team at Moffitt Cancer Center, both administratively in our CEO office.

In my lab, I have an incredible team in the clinic.

I have an amazing team.

It's just having wonderful team members that you support and trust is critical to, to being able to do multiple things and to help the world and the way you can, the best way you can.

I don't feel like I have a job.

I don't feel like I work, I love what I'm doing.

I love the people at Moffitt Cancer Center.

I love the incredible people in the Tampa Bay community.

I love interacting with everybody.

I love going to Tallahassee.

I love what I do, and that's critical.

And part of that is understanding why you're doing it.

If you're here to help the world, to help people, it's not about getting awards.

It's not about being called number one.

It's not about any of that.

If you're here to save lives, if the meaning behind what you're doing is impactful and what we're trying to do, as our mission statement says, is to prevent and cure cancer, when that's part of your life, you're going to love that and be passionate about that.

And that's what I see also in every team member at Moffitt Cancer Center.

- And John Couris sees a bright future for health care services in the Tampa Bay area.

- We have to move from volume to value.

So we have to change the conversations that we're having with our payers.

We have to change the in the in the meeting rooms and over the negotiations related to our contracts.

That conversation has to change from let's not just focus on paying me for volume.

Let's work on a program that pays me for value.

So the outcomes that patients receive when they come to the institution or any one of our outpatient centers, the quality that they get, the service they get, the safety that they receive or the environment around them.

Pay me for the value of the work related to the outcome of the work.

That's the shift that's happening, and that's exciting.

That's the future.

And TGH we're we're ready for it.

- It was generations in the making.

And now these three hospital groups are world-class health care leaders.

Their common goal is that you never have to leave this area to get the best health care possible.

If you'd like to see this program again or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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