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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. Mark G. Moseley, President of USF Tampa General Physicians and Executive Vice President of Tampa General Hospital
00:16:22
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- [00:02]
A
This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former President George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalreview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right. Looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.
- [00:33]
B
This is Alan Condon with another episode of the Beckers Healthcare Podcast and today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Mark Mosley, President of USF Tampa General Physicians and Executive Vice President of Tampa General Hospital. Dr. Moseley, it's always a pleasure to get to speak with real top leaders like yourself. Really excited to welcome you back back to the Becker's podcast with us today. For those of our listeners who mightn't be as well acquainted or as familiar with you at the work that you do at Tampa General Hospital, do you mind sharing a little bit more about your role and your background? Sure.
- [01:08]
C
No, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. You nailed my titles and I'm an emergency physician by training and I used to save lives. Now I save meetings one meeting at a time. It's a privilege to represent the Tampa General Hospital USF University of South Florida Academic Health System. We're a large integrated health system on the west coast of Florida. 15,000 providers, physicians, team members, leaders, and our vision is really to be the safest and most innovative academic health system in America. And it's a privilege to talk about our work here and what we're hoping to accomplish together.
- [01:51]
B
Fantastic. And I'm excited to do exactly that. I think the time of recording it's coming up to the end of December 2025. A bit of a period of reflection as we head into 2026, zooming into one specific initiative. No doubt there were many, but what was the most important initiative you led in 2025? What did you do and what were the results? If there's one thing you can nail down into.
- [02:21]
C
So I think if you asked any leader in a large health system across the country, one of the common themes or topics that we come up is access. And so that's definitely an area we spent a lot of time in in the last year looking at the people, processes and technology that we need to be successful in meeting the needs and demands of our patients. I think many of the listeners will be familiar with the Michael Porter definition of value, higher quality for lower cost. But you can't get value without access to care. And so we spent a lot of time focusing on scheduling apparatus and a multi channel of communications and how our EHR templates are optimized. We've deployed agentic AI and a customer relationship management system and that's really to just make sure that we can communicate effectively with our patients. They can, they can get in touch with us and then they can, they can get in to see the providers and the physicians they need to. We did it. We paired that with the physician needs assessment and our goal is really to navigate people through this system. You know, we had some challenges like many places do. In our call Center AgentIC AI was deployed and you know, you asked for some sort of results. We went from a typical call center call handle rate and call abandonment rate to a zero percent call drop rate. Right. By deploying that AI agent and allowing our staff to manage the tougher cases, the outbound calls and some of the initial operator functions are significantly improved, we're going to answer 2 million calls this year. And that's really daunting for a system like ours. So I would say again, our successes this year about deploying technology, making sure that we're providing access to care and easy ways to engage with us so that it's not a garden. Right. So if we fixed all of scheduling and could schedule every call that came in, but we didn't have the physicians or providers that were necessary to meet that demand, that's just putting your foot on the garden hose in a different location. And we're blessed to be in a growing state as a very in demand academic medical center. It's a great problem to have, but it's still a problem gone.
- [04:42]
B
Yeah, I think the fascinating just to hear the results of the, the agentic AI deployed in the call center. Two million calls, I believe you said. Tampa General Hospital 2025. I think that's the, the, the, the challenge with the AI. We kind of hear this kind of catch, alternative buzzword but it can really helpful to other executives, other listeners listen to this podcast in terms of specific tangible results that this agentic AI technology deployed in your call center has achieved. I guess one quick follow up, follow up for that. No doubt huge results there. When you think of any other areas, opportunities to use agentic AI, whether it's in access to care or any other opportunities, is there anywhere else that you're thinking about leveraging this technology at Tampa General in 2026 and beyond?
- [05:28]
C
Yeah, I think as we seek to be a more integrated system this may have worked really well in our physician practice call center, but how do we do that for imaging? How do we do that for other scheduling opportunities when people have questions about their bills, like how can we deploy it in a thoughtful way? And again, our intention here is to not replace people with technology. It's to augment the people that we have so that they're more efficient and can work to the highest and best purpose of their skill. So I think those would be some areas that we would probably try to expand it to. Revenue cycle is definitely an area that we're integrating AI into. So those would be some areas of priority for us in the coming year to just expand that world.
- [06:13]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. So access to care, obviously one big key area where you've made some great strides this year. Looking ahead to 2026, what are your big priorities, big headwinds that you're focused on tackling? Dr. Mosley?
- [06:27]
C
Yeah, I think you said it well. I mean, there are headwinds and it may be bumpy this year because of the external environment and just the challenges that we're all facing in healthcare. One of the things that we're really going to focus on more this year is just how patients are experiencing us. The concept of we have amazing team members, physicians, providers, leaders that are very, very engaged. But there's a gap sometimes between that engagement and the world class results. And I call that the intention gap. So that intention gap is what we intend to do versus what we actually do and how patients perspective, perceive it. And so just like we're taking a journey to high reliability in the quality sense as we move towards zero harm. Like many healthcare organizations, we're talking about human high reliability, which, it's not an oxymoron, right? It's about the behaviors and how we can be more consistent in those behaviors. So I'll give you an example. To make it more tangible, we're partnering with Preston gaming around the concept of social capital. How can we get our teams to trust each other more locally and for patients to feel and experience that trust? And then how can we take teams that are performing well individually and bridge them to other teams that they may not be working well because patients perceive that, they perceive that the care is coordinated or not coordinated. And I think building trust through consistency will help us be experienced in a better way by our patients, but also help us achieve our key performance indicators in a more highly reliable fashion.
- [08:07]
B
I'm wondering, can you speak to the patient experience in 2026 more broadly as kind of technology becomes more deeply integrated across the health system. How important that human touch is, that trust is that you've mentioned. And also I guess when, when we're entering this consumerism era of healthcare where patients are frequently shopping around for lack of a better term for their care, I'm wondering just kind of a note on the patient experience, the consumer experience and how important that is arguably now maybe more important than ever.
- [08:40]
C
Yeah, that's again, really well said. I think it shouldn't be a novel concept that consumerism has invaded healthcare. And I think in many ways that's a byproduct of the complexity of the system and people wanting the best. And you know, as we look forward to a bumpy year from a financial perspective and what happens to the ACA subsidies, we may have a lot more people that are trying to negotiate prices with health care providers. And so how can we do that? How can we meet people where they are? And again, I think people are interested in convenience, they're worried about quality, but they want human connection. You know, if you have somebody in your family that's diagnosed with something like cancer, you want there to be a caring touch, you want there to be a personal connection with the care providers in that team. Because again, that's the empathy and the trust that we have to have in healthcare so that patients can go through the evidence based protocols and the ways that we can help get them better. If they don't trust us and we don't have that human connection, we're just going to have worse outcomes. I think from my perspective as an academic, it's about doing evidence based care. It's doing it in a connected way with our teams and then helping those teams really have the resources to connect the patients and emphasize those human connection at a time of disruptive technology and healthcare?
- [10:04]
B
Yeah, I think so.
- [10:05]
C
Well put.
- [10:06]
B
So I said from a leader like yourself, from a physician like yourself as well, Dr. Mosey, you touched on just this kind of challenge that we're facing at the moment in terms of ACA subsidies. We know Medicaid reimbursement cuts coming down the pipeline in 2026 and 2027. No doubt there ubiquitous challenges in healthcare and not to spend too much time on the doom and gloom, a lot of opportunity and growth as well. But what is when you look ahead to next year in your eyes, what is the hardest thing that you'll have to do at Tampa General in the coming year?
- [10:39]
C
I think we're going to have the same challenges that everybody else does. But can we stay focused right It's a time, you know, you just brought up a number of things that could lead to a lot of distraction. In our big health systems, we often have a lot of initiatives targeted on those key performance indicators. Are we going to have initiative fatigue? Do we have communication gaps? I think it's really about how can we as leaders engage with our teams? How can we communicate clearly? What's the why behind why we're doing things and build that coalition of the willing to tackle the problems that are within our control. And I love stoic philosophy and I think one of the, the key tenets of the stoics is you should worry about things you can control. We aren't going to control what happens at the federal level, but we can control our behaviors and how we show up every day at work and how our teams interact with each other. So for us, we're going to really focus on, we're going to focus on our teams and we're going to focus on trying to keep people attuned to our priorities that are going to help us achieve the results we need during a very turbulent time in the industry.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah, I think at least there's strength in numbers. Absolutely. It seems like a very proactive, intentional plan to tackle some of these challenges coming down the pipeline. Head on next year. On the other side of the spectrum, Dr. Moseley, I'd love to end on growth, growth opportunities. Tampa General Hospital. I know a lot of exciting things going on at your health system, but when you look ahead to the next couple of years, where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth?
- [12:19]
C
So our growth, we always try and couch in our mission or shared purpose and that's we heal, we teach, we innovate, we care for everyone every day. So we're part of the healthcare safety net in this community. And so we have to balance our expansion between those academic, medical center sort of side to what we do and then the community based and rural healthcare side what we do. So on the AMC side, we have to be able to take care of the rare, complex, esoteric, critically ill patients and provide the services that only we can provide as an AMC to our community and be able to receive those referrals and have the, have the physicians, providers, infrastructures, beds to take care for those patients the way that they need to be taken care of. On the other hand, we're a big believer that if rural health care fails in our communities, it's going to put an incredible strain on the health care safety net. So we've extended our shared purpose into some More rural communities in Florida and we're bringing services to them more locally that would allow patients to stay local. I think that's what patients want. If they need to come to the academic medical center, then we'll have that connection. And we're trying to do that in a thoughtful way. It's not always about building a hospital. It's, you know, how can we have an asset light strategy, offer urgent care, ambulatory care services like primary care and imaging and lab, and offer services in those communities that they don't otherwise have good access. So our goal in the future is really balance and again, it's based on our achieving our shared purpose.
- [13:55]
B
Yeah, absolutely. One, maybe last quick kind of follow up question before I let you go. Just as it relates to academic health systems and community hospitals and whatnot, we recently covered a Becker's, I believe about 22, 23 academic health systems that have acquired or plan to acquire community hospitals, maybe smaller independent health systems this year into next year. Certainly a trend that we've seen to pick up steam maybe over the last year or so on the back of the pandemic, very much so in the rearview mirror. But unfortunately a lot of community hospitals, a lot of rural hospitals still somewhat struggling in terms of you prediction wise, kind of. Is this a trend that you continue to see going on in 2026 and then maybe Tampa General Hospital yourself potentially eyeing some of these partnerships or growth by hospitals as well?
- [14:46]
C
Yeah, I think the modern academic health system has to be better at partnerships. And so one of the things that we're focused on is we want to be good partners, but we may have less partners that are deeper relationships. I think our listeners will know mergers and acquisitions and closures are going to happen in the industry and this may be a significant year for that. But my concern is as we take on those responsibilities and as we think through partnerships, are they aligned with our culture? Is this a good cultural fit? Most deals fall apart because of things like money and ego and brand. But ultimately, when you're talking about integration activities between a community hospital joining an academic health system, it often fails because of cultural friction. Right. So our goal is to again, rigidly adhere to our shared purpose, vision and values, but be flexible about how we set it up and thoughtful about the time frame of those types of integrations. Again, for us, it's all about those values and making sure everybody's aligned and then that reduce cultural threshold.
- [15:56]
B
Yeah, I think so. Just a quick little last minute question I wanted to pop in there. Just kind of given some of the trends we've been following this year, but some great insights. And so well said, Dr. Mosley. So greatly appreciate your time. So greatly appreciate and respect the work that you, your team at Tampa General do. And thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to have a chat with us on the Backers Healthcare podcast. Thank you.
- [16:17]
C
Now thank you so much. Always great to be on.