← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Dr. Mark Moseley, President of USF Tampa General Physicians at Tampa General Hospital
00:12:33
Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is Laura Dardo with the Beckers Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Mark Mosley, President of USF Tampa General Physicians at Tampa General Hospital. Dr. Moseley, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:13]
B
Thank you for having me, Laura. Really appreciate it.
- [00:16]
A
Absolutely. And you know, I'm excited for our discussion because I know you're doing some really innovative things at Tampa General. And certainly it'll be exciting to dig a little bit into some of those different projects and initiatives and things that are going really well as well as get your perspective on the future. So it'll be a lot of fun to do that. But before we dive in, I'm wondering, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Tampa General?
- [00:38]
B
Sure, absolutely. So I'm an emergency physician by training and I have traded, as I like to joke, saving people's lives for saving meetings one meeting at a time. I am the president of a large academic physician practice at Tampa General Hospital. I also happen to be the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine. So very apropos for what we are. We're TGH and USF together form one of the largest, most integrated and comprehensive academic medical centers in Florida of over 15,000 team members, providers, physicians, and we really span the entirety of the state servicing the state of Florida and the patients that need us, both from a safety net perspective as well as from a high end tertiary and quaternary care perspective.
- [01:31]
A
That's amazing to hear. And you know, I know a ton of things that you cover there between USF and Tampa General. And fascinating to hear more about that integration that you've got between the academic facility as well as the health system. What are some of the big success stories or wins that you've had from the last year?
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, so I think that maybe one of the things I may say too much is there's just so much going on. There's so much going on right now in the world in health care. And you know, from a, from a cultural perspective, I think one of our, our biggest success stories is just keeping people focused by investing in our culture around shared purpose, vision and values. We're trying to help our people show up every day to do their best work when it really matters most. I think like most large, complex organizations, we have key performance indicators, we have a strategic plan that those are linked. But executing on those in the current state requires us as leaders to help keep our teams focused so we can really help them achieve excellence in all that we do. All of the things that I could talk about that we're working on, our initiatives would fall apart if it wasn't for that investment in culture. So I think really our biggest success story in this last year was so many things going on externally in healthcare has just been really keeping our people focused and prioritized by investing in culture.
- [03:07]
A
I think that is such an important aspect of running a successful organization and teams is having that right culture and being able to develop the appropriate kind of feeling within the health system, whether it's for the workforce and then, I know, for patients as well. So when you think about that culture, what do you do differently that leads to great results?
- [03:30]
B
Yeah. So I think as leaders, are we connecting the dots for our people? Are we clearly communicating them about a coherent theme for all of our initiative and tactics so that, you know, our key performance indicators linked to our strategic plans don't become one flavor of the month after another, that we don't have valid initiative fatigue for our people. So I think as leaders, we have to do a good job of communicating why we're doing things related to our strategic plans and the importance of helping our people achieve their goals related to those. And, you know, as a leader, when you communicate, it's about building trust through consistency. I've been privileged to work with some executive coaches in my career, and one of the things that they've talked about in a complexity fit leader is the ability to manage uncertainty. And I think one of the biggest challenges for leaders right now in healthcare is that uncertainty that exists with things beyond our control. I've been told there's really two types of uncertainty. There's uncertainty that we can reduce and uncertainty that we can't reduce. The reducible form of uncertainty is something we're really good at in healthcare. We apply the principles of high reliability, just culture, lean, six sigma, we apply rigor logic, and we can solve complex problems. So we're really good at that. Unfortunately, there's so many things in healthcare that come our way that we don't possess the ability to reduce with those tools. As a result, we have to help our people be able to absorb them. And that's sort of the concept of adaptive capacity. Can we help our people be resilient and absorb that uncertainty at a time of great change? And I think again, that comes from building trust through consistency, how we communicate with people and making sure that they're really focused on the work that we're doing together so that it makes sense.
- [05:31]
A
Absolutely. I love that. Thank you for digging a little bit deeper there. Now, what are the top two to three issues you're focused on right now?
- [05:38]
B
I think as an academic medical center, we have to balance providing safety net services to our community, but also serving the entire state of Florida. So I would say, you know, a priority for us is we can't be all things to all people, but one of the social compacts with academic medicine is that we sort of have to be right. So we have to provide for our community. At the same time, we have to provide high end services for our entire state. So things like world class clinical trials, innovative new technologies and therapies, and high end services for sick, complex and critically ill patients. And in order to do that, we have to have deep and meaningful partnerships. We have to be really focused. We're organized around service lines and I think that that helps us chunk up the work in a way that allows us to focus on those aims and to be successful. So, you know, on one end of the spectrum, we have to engage with our patients and help them with their wellness and the experience of how they interact with us. On the other end of the spectrum, we have to provide hope to people during challenging times when they have difficult diagnoses that only we can make and only we can treat. I think that that's the, that's the great challenge of being a comprehensive academic medical center, but it's one that we try and rise to every day.
- [07:03]
A
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. And I appreciate you spelling out that challenge for us because, you know, it can certainly make a big difference in how you approach any type of, you know, new way that you're trying to integrate your teams as well as thinking through care delivery on a broader scale. So thank you so much for that. And you know, in looking ahead, I'm curious, what are some of the big opportunities for growth that you see over the next few years as well?
- [07:32]
B
Yeah. So maybe just a slight tangent here to say that I led a book club recently for our new leaders, and we reviewed Michael Watkins great book, the First 90 Days, which talks about how you should approach a new assignment or a new job. But I think there's some classic leadership teachings in that book. And one of the things that comes out loud and clear is this classic leadership fallacy of assuming that what made you successful in the past will enable your future success. So anything we talk about for the future, how we focus on growth, some of the things that we just talked about related to service lines, we have to adapt and change with the times, I think that's incredibly relevant for our future in healthcare. If we don't change what we're doing, if we don't execute more effectively, if we don't focus and prioritize, I think that change is going to come from external sources whether we like it or not. And if we don't change and become more effective at change, we're going to become less relevant as healthcare entities because that change is going to come from outside of us. So I would just say we have to be really focused on our strategic plan. We have to focus on areas that we want to invest in. That balance what we talked about from safety net services that we might provide, health and wellness, things that we might provide for patients, all the way to high end tertiary and quaternary work. So I think it's a daunting challenge to provide that spectrum. But I think again for most organizations it's about what's your shared purpose, what is your vision, what are your values and making sure that every initiative, every key performance indicator is tied to both.
- [09:20]
A
I love that. I think as you mentioned, it's just so critical, especially as quickly as the landscape is changing today and healthcare is transforming, to have that nimble leadership team ready to be successful and adapt. So I think that is amazing to hear and I appreciate how much that fits into kind of everything that's needed to be a successful leader right now. And when you look into the next five years or so, what do you think it will take in order to build a thriving organization?
- [09:52]
B
I think at risk of being repetitive and being viewed as just a spiritual leader or frankly the apostle of the obvious here, we have to block and tackle, right? We have to apply principles of high reliability and we have to commit to excellence in achieving that Porter value equation of higher quality for lower cost. I still really believe in that and I believe that the organizations that are successful in the future are going to do that. But to achieve that excellence in the future, given all of the complexities we talked about, I think we have to be strongly connected with each other and develop outstanding teams and, you know, sort of the concept that strong teams produce strong results. This goes back to a principle from a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam from 2000 that looked at this concept of social capital. His book was really a data treatise on the decline in social memberships and connections. And lots of other pundits and editorialists have talked about this focus on individualism versus organizations. I think Dr. Tom Lee, who's the chief medical officer of Press Ganey as well as the editor for New England journal Catalyst. He just wrote a book called Social Capital in Health Care. And I think it really brilliantly applies this concept. We have to work together. Our future is together. How we interact with each other, the people that report to us and who we report to is really important. How we form teams, how we invest in our relationships. And I think if you ask me what's going to be the template for a thriving organization over the next five years, I'm going to ask you, what's the strength of the relationships in that organization? How do those relationships develop a stronger, more cohesive culture that allows people to execute on the key priorities? And so I think, again, our hypothesis, our contention is we really want to invest in our team members, our providers, our physicians to make sure we're aligned and engaged, focused on the right problems. But we got to do that because health care is a team sport, and we got to do it together.
- [12:18]
A
What an inspirational message. Thank you so much, Dr. Moseley, for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation, and I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
- [12:27]
B
Thank you so much. Appreciate the chance to be here today.