← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript19 lines
- [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 Laura Deardo with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by John Kors, CEO of Florida Health Science center and Tampa General Hospital. John, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:43]
A
It's great to be with you.
- [00:45]
B
Absolutely. Now, I'm really excited for our conversation because I know Tampa General and Florida Health Science center as well are very innovative healthcare organizations looking at many different ways to deliver care and always on the cutting edge. So I'm excited to learn a little bit more about what you've done this year and how you're thinking about the future. But before we dive into that, can you tell us, and especially for those who are just starting to listen to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, a little bit about your background in Tampa General as well?
- [01:13]
A
Yeah, so. So, absolutely. So I've been with Tampa General and Florida Health Sciences center for over eight years. My background has been all in health care. I started my career at the Mass at what is now called the Mass General Brigham Health System in Boston. I spent almost 11 years there, really in my formative part of my career. Then I went on to the Baker Health System in Tampa, went over to Jupiter, to Jupiter Medical center for seven and a half years and wanted to really get back to the academic environment. And so ended up back at Tampa General and really usf, USF Health, because between Tampa General and USF Health, which is part of the University of South Florida, we're one large academic health system. And so in my training, I went to Boston University. I went on and ultimately got a doctorate in business administration, which is really oriented around management and social science from the University of South Florida. And obviously in between all of that, got my master's in science, actually in operations management and management. And so I've always been in the healthcare space. I've always been in either operations or clinical operations. And I've been here for eight years, as I said a moment ago, and it's been wonderful.
- [02:46]
B
Fantastic. Now, I'm curious, could you tell us a little bit about the most important initiative that you led in the last year. What did you do and what were the results?
- [02:55]
A
I think the health system overall has done really incredible work. The teams are really focused, very disciplined, understand the importance of creating real value in the communities that we serve. So we've been doing a lot of work from a service outcome and cost perspective. Some of the work that makes me most proud is that my team and I have been working on. One thing that comes to mind is the work that we've done with the university, with the University of South Florida. I think bringing the academic health system together with the university over the last year has been really meaningful work. It's taking a robust academic health system, connecting it with a university and a medical school, the Mersani College of Medicine, and integrating them, integrating them clinically, integrating them educationally, integrating them from a research perspective and financially integrating them. Supporting faculty salaries, supporting and enhancing GME and supporting and enhancing underfunded research. It's been wonderful. I mean, we invest in the academic enterprise over at the university on an annual basis, roughly $162 million a year. And I'm very proud of that investment. And it's some of the most important work that we've done and it will continue to be some of the most important work that we're going to continue to work on.
- [04:49]
B
That's amazing to hear. And certainly that research investment, that care delivery is so, so critical. Looking ahead into 2026, what are some of those big priorities specifically that you have your eye on, as well as the headwinds that could make an impact on the organization?
- [05:06]
A
Just to set it up contextually, when I think about 2026 and I think about the headwinds that we are going to be confronting as an industry, I don't only think about it in terms of what's in front of us for the next year, but I think about what could the next three years look like. When I think about it in terms like that, obviously, 2026 being right in front of us, I. The analogy I use is, is, you know, the. Because we live in Florida and we're prone to hurricanes, I'm going to use sort of an analogy around hurricanes. When a storm starts to accumulate, the barometric pressure starts to drop, then you start to feel out of outer bands of the storm and then you feel the hurricane itself. I feel like 2026 is going to be about the barometric pressure dropping. I don't think we're going to see huge changes in, in health care in 2026, now, do I? Clearly, if the ACA sunsets and the federal government doesn't figure out a way to fix that, then yeah. Do I think expansion states are going to feel pressure that non expansion states aren't going to feel as much? Absolutely. That the aca, the elimination of the ACA is something that we're all going to have to reconcile unless something changes in the next couple of weeks. But with that said, I think most other things are going to stay the same and I think what we're going to start to feel is, is atmospheric pressure changing. I think in 2027 and 2028 we'll start to feel really some significant effects from both, both policy and funding changes that are being sort of put through the federal government. And I think we need to prepare for it. I don't look at this as the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination. Whatever challenges and obstacles get set in front of us, we will figure out as an industry. Our industry is very resilient. Our industry has really smart, thoughtful people in it and leading it. We will figure this out together. But as the atmospheric conditions start to change, what are we doing at Florida Health Sciences center and USF and tgh, you know, what are we doing to prepare ourselves for it? Well, a couple things. One, we have a pretty significant initiative that we call 3 and 30. We started it a year ago in anticipation for what we thought and still think could happen over the next three years with the changes that are being socialized, discussed and some have already been legislated. And so 3 and 30 is, we need to, we need to improve our operating margins by 3% over the next 30 months, our operating EBITDA margins, to be more specific. So we have teams of people working on continuing to improve processes and systems efficiency and effectiveness so we can build even a stronger operating EBITDA by leaning out inefficiencies throughout the system. So that's one big initiative that we're working on. And like I said a moment ago, we started this at the tail end of 24. We've worked through this all the way through 25 and we're going to continue to work on this over the next two to three years. I'm very excited about that, this work because it's, it's, we get, we've gotten way out ahead of it. We're being very thoughtful. We're taking a holistic view of it across the whole system in a very balanced way. And I'm excited about the work. We're already starting to see some improvements coming into the enterprise. So lots of activity around that. And we're trying to be as proactive as we can be. So that's one big exciting initiative. The second activity that we're focusing on is our continued work around care coordination. We've been working on this for the last three or four years and we've been slowly implementing a care coordination model that has the patient and the provider. So think about the doctor, the nurse, et cetera, in the center of that system of care. Because if you think about the type of business we're in from our perspective, and I'm just giving you a perspective, we believe we're in the care coordination business. We're really not in the health and wellness business. A piece of what we do is oriented obviously and focused on health and wellness. And it's an important piece of our activity, but it's really not who we believe we are. We're in the care coordination business. Our job is to coordinate care for patients through the whole system that is seamless, that reduces fragmentation, that eliminates silos, and that applies a system thinking approach to how we deliver care that's patient centered and provider centric. And so that's another big initiative that we're really excited about. I mean, really excited about. An example of that, to put a finer point on it, is the work we're doing, Laura, with agentic AI in our experience center, which is our call center we just deployed a couple of months ago, agentic AI that was designed to triage phone calls. Just a couple of months ago, it has triaged hundreds of thousands of calls seamlessly and effortlessly. About a week ago, we turned on our agentic AI tool to schedule appointments. So to answer the call, schedule the appointment. When we turned gentic AI on our call, abandonment rate dropped to zero. Every call was answered and, and care coordination was applied in scheduling appointments and making sure that patients got to where they needed to get to in a very efficient manner. Starting the journey around care coordination from the first phone call, Is it perfect? It's not. Are we learning with the tool we are. Is it incredibly effective? Absolutely. It's been an absolute game changer for us. So when I talk about care coordination.
- [13:13]
B
With.
- [13:13]
A
When someone calls us for help for an appointment and it runs through the entire system of care that we're building. It's all about. It's all about coordinating care for the patients that we're responsible for. Those are a few initiatives that we're really excited about.
- [13:35]
B
That's fantastic to hear. You know, really cool to think about those results, especially on the care Coordination side, as you mentioned, and then how you're looking at and thinking about that margin improvement as well is just so critical across all fronts to dovetail into that overall mission too, of being able to provide care for patients, improve access and those types of things. Now, looking ahead and curious as well, what is the hardest thing you'll have to do in the next year or so?
- [14:02]
A
It's a great question. I think that some of the hardest work that we're going to have to really continue to focus on, ties to what I mentioned a moment ago around our 3 and 30 initiatives, 3, 3 points of operating EBITDA over the next 30 months that just, we're gonna, we're gonna have to stay really, really focused on that. Really focused. We're doing it through process improvement. We're doing it through improving efficiency and effectiveness of care. We have, you know, we have no plans to furlough people, lay people off all that freeze positions. That is not in our playbook. But everything else sort of oriented around just providing real value to the consumer, but doing that by building really efficient and effective models of care. That's going to be some of the most difficult work we have in front of us. And we're probably not alone in that. Laura, lots of health systems are doing lots of really interesting and important and impactful work. We're probably all confronted with the complexity and challenges of remaining really focused and disciplined. And it's a lot of work. I mean, this kind of work that I just explain to you, it's a grind, it's a real grind and it requires lots and lots of focus and teamwork. And thankfully I've got a team that's absolutely outstanding. I mean, they are world class.
- [15:48]
B
100%, I think, really, really cool to hear about some of that work that you're doing and continue to have that mission of keeping the team on board, but then also, you know, making those improvements with them as well. Before we wrap up here, where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth?
- [16:06]
A
Another great question, where do I see opportunities in organizational growth? I think it's probably in the category of models of care that are being developed and implemented across the country. I think with health systems that can provide new and innovative ways to deliver care efficiently and effectively, high degrees of quality, low and competitive cost, passed on in part to the consumer of health care, defined as the patient, the payer and the employer, I think there's a lot of opportunity in that space to collaborate, to innovate, to partner with organizations. I think that's going to be some exciting space and it's going to represent some really interesting areas to grow your business. I'm not, you know, I think the, you know, this may be a little controversial. You know, building more hospitals. That's an old model. It's an old paradigm, and candidly, it's an incredibly expensive one. I'm not sure how much value building net new hospitals are. I mean, there are, there are exceptions, obviously, there are parts of our community that are growing that need it, but those are, those are few and far between. But there are, there are some of those, those opportunities. There's maybe some opportunity to buy an old hospital and then, you know, raise it and then replace it with a new hospital. Those are, but those, again, are sort of far and few between. It's not really, you know, building things indiscriminately. That's just, that's an old paradigm. I think it centers more around how do you do a better job with the portfolio of services that you have? How do you take your platform and maximize it? And I think one big way to do that is, is through new delivery care models that improve quality and lower cost. Let me give you an example, Laura. Hospital at home. We don't have the largest hospital at home program in the country. We have one of the largest programs in the United States. But we have one of the fastest growing ones. And we are very, very busy. And this hospital at home program is a game changer. We're seeing better outcomes, better quality, better patient and staff satisfaction over time at a lower cost. That's a totally different model of care. And what we're planning for in the future is pivoting from a hospital at home program to what we're calling a health system at home program where we can bring in vertical clinical service lines into the home beyond the traditional inpatient model. For example, infusions. Instead of going to the hospital for your infusion, you can get that at home as part of our health system at home offering. So that's what I mean by like a different model of care. We're really excited about it. Hospital at home has been a huge win for us. Our average daily census of some pretty sick patients is floats between 16 and.
- [20:04]
B
18.
- [20:07]
A
On any given day. It's helped our ER throughput, it's helped some of our busy clinical service lines and getting people out of the hospital and getting their care delivered at home, which patients absolutely love it. So it's been a huge win for everyone. So when I talk about new models of care, that's an example of a new model of care that I think is going to grow pretty significantly in 2026. We're certainly doubling down on it because it's been hugely impactful for us and for the patients that we care for. I'm really excited about that, that, that, that work.
- [20:54]
B
Absolutely. A lot to be excited about there. John, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you as well at our annual meeting in April. I know you'll be speaking there upcoming, so look forward to learning more and digging a bit deeper into these themes.
- [21:10]
A
Thanks, Laura. Really appreciate it.