Shane Strum, President and CEO of Broward Health, and Matthew Love, President and CEO of Nicklaus Children’s Health System

Summary

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Episode: Pediatric Collaboration in South Florida
Guests: Shane Strum (President & CEO, Broward Health) and Matthew Love (President & CEO, Nicklaus Children’s Health System)
Date: May 16, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the groundbreaking partnership between Broward Health and Nicklaus Children’s Health System, led by CEOs Shane Strum and Matthew Love. Mariah Taylor (host) explores their collaborative model aimed at building a pediatric care ecosystem that transcends traditional hospital “four walls” and improves access, efficiency, and quality of pediatric healthcare across South Florida. The conversation covers their motivations, structural differences from typical referral networks, early outcomes, long-term vision, and how they are approaching financial sustainability.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Vision for a New Pediatric Ecosystem

• Matthew Love outlines the rationale:
  • The joint ecosystem began with shared vision and leadership synergy.
  • It’s “not about the four walls” or geographical boundaries, but about bringing the best pediatric care and subspecialists close to home for all children in the region.
  • Focus on truly integrated, collaborative, and coordinated care—moving away from fragmentation between organizations (00:27–02:26).
  • “The most fundamental piece of our ecosystem is really putting patients and families first and taking care of kids close to home.” (B – 01:56)

Transformational, Not Transactional, Partnership

• Love differentiates their model from traditional pediatric referral networks:
  • Most networks are “transactional” (paper-driven, referral-based, temporary). Their aim is “transformational,” built to last for generations (02:45).
  • Embedding collaboration between organizations guarantees sustainability beyond current leadership.
  • "Building something on transactions... is a recipe for failure once the leaders are gone." (B – 03:01)

Broward Health’s Motivations and Approach

• Shane Strum discusses Broward Health’s decision to collaborate:
  • Broward Health’s pediatric history dates back 90 years, but the current landscape included small embedded units while neighboring hospitals grew larger and more specialized.
  • Questioned whether to compete or collaborate for specialty resources and expertise.
  • Collaboration minimizes market fragmentation, allows for operational efficiencies, and provides immediate access to expert care (04:16–08:39).
  • Deep, trust-based relationship between the two CEOs—and their shared service on state alliances—paved the way for success.
  • “We said, instead of competing for more physicians and growing the number of staff and fragmenting the market, why don't we really look at collaborating? How do you create these operational efficiencies? How do we make sure that there's immediate access to all the experts?” (C – 05:45)
  • Successful launch of the collaboration on March 1; already achieving milestones, such as specialty procedures now possible at Broward Health thanks to Nicklaus expertise.
  • Meaningful impact: Prior to this network, about 20% of children needed to travel to Miami—now specialty care is being delivered locally.

Long-term Vision: Regional Pediatric Health Network

• Strum and Love articulate aspiration toward a Florida-wide model akin to leading pediatric systems in Atlanta and Philadelphia (Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia).
  • Envision bringing in additional partners, notably Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, to build an expansive tri-county (over 6 million people) pediatric care network (08:52–12:11).
  • Reducing travel barriers for families, consolidating expertise, and enhancing recruitment of top specialists.
  • "Our real core belief is that families shouldn't have to take off a day of work to navigate the distance or the traffic to ensure that their child has access to the best possible specialty care." (C – 10:16)
  • Love (B): “There’s no reason why we can’t be better than many of those other organizations. I think that really is the vision and the collaboration and the cooperation that really brings us together to figure out, how do we do that. And to me, that’s the exciting part. What’s next?” (B – 11:35)
  • Strum: "We don't have a Children's Hospital of Florida. So why can't these great pediatric organizations come together and really create more access, more efficiencies? ... This might be a once in a lifetime opportunity...” (C – 12:11)

Financial Model and Viability

• Love addresses economics of collaboration in a financially challenging (mostly Medicaid) pediatric landscape:
  • Majority of their business is Medicaid (65–70%), requiring careful balance for sustainability (14:19–16:35).
  • Partnership must always be “win-win” for all organizations and, most importantly, for the children and families.
  • “Things do not last when one organization wins and one organization loses. … It’s how does everybody win, and most importantly, how do the kids win and get access to this care close to home that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to?” (B – 16:20)
  • Emphasis on spreading costs over a larger infrastructure, reducing duplicated services, and pulling resources together to combat pediatric “deserts.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Matthew Love:
  • “This is really around building something where kids receive the best care close to home. Fundamentally, we put everything else aside.” (B – 00:54)
  • “It has to be transformational. This has to be last for generations.” (B – 02:54)
  • “In the aggregate, we both have come out really, really, really good... If we’re really here for the long run, what needs to happen financially today versus next year versus five years down the road, it’s going to ebb and flow.” (B – 15:13)
• Shane Strum:
  • “Why don't we really look at collaborating? How do you create these operational efficiencies? How do we make sure that there's immediate access to all the experts?” (C – 05:45)
  • “This marriage and partnership between Broward Health and Nicholas has really been magic.” (C – 07:37)
  • “This might be a once in a lifetime opportunity where these organizations are not only really collaborating, partnering, working together.” (C – 12:28)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:27–02:26 – Matthew Love introduces the pediatric ecosystem’s vision.
• 02:45–04:06 – How the new model structurally differs from past networks.
• 04:16–08:39 – Shane Strum details Broward Health’s motivations, collaborative process, and early outcomes.
• 08:52–12:11 – Long-term vision for a regional / statewide pediatric network and future partnerships.
• 13:36–16:35 – The financial considerations and sustainability of collaborative pediatric care.

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Summary

Through a deeply collaborative, patient-first approach, Shane Strum and Matthew Love are spearheading a new era in pediatric healthcare for South Florida, reducing fragmentation and increasing access by breaking down institutional silos. Their model, built on trust and shared vision, aspires to form a “Children’s Hospital of Florida”-level collaboration, ensuring that specialty care is accessible locally for millions of children. By pooling resources, expertise, and financial strategies, their partnership aims to be lasting and transformative, setting a replicable standard for pediatric care networks nationwide.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Clinical Leadership Podcast. I'm Mariah Taylor, assistant editor, and I'm thrilled to be speaking with Shane Strum, president and CEO of Broward Health, as well as Matthew Love, president and CEO of Nicholas Children's Health System. Thank you both for being here today. I'm really excited to dive more into your pediatric collaboration. So, Matt, how about we start with you? Can you give us a quick rundown of the pediatric ecosystem you're building?

[B]

Yeah, you know, it's great to be here. You know, this is really an exciting time for children here in South Florida and for. For people in our great state here in Florida. You know, this ecosystem, you know, really started with a vision. And, you know, when you get two leaders who can come together. I remember the early conversations with Shane around, how do we create something special, something impactful, and really started with that basic fundamental in place. Right. And so two leaders. I can't say enough of great things about Shane around really seeing this vision around pediatric healthcare. So this is not about the four walls or this is not about geography, Right. This is really around building something where kids receive the best care close to home. Fundamentally, we put everything else aside. How do we bring the specialists, the subspecialist, to all the kids in Miami Dade, all the kids in Broward, even the kids in Palm beach area around those pieces and do it in an integrated. In a collaborative and a coordinated network. So really building something from the ground up that isn't necessarily that traditional ecosystem around. Again, we use Shane, and I use the word the four walls. Right? This is around pediatric community. It's around getting care closer to kids in their home so they don't have to travel. It's about recruiting great specialists as we think about economies of scale and growth. And so all of those things really coming together. But one of the things I think that is really the most fundamental piece of our ecosystem is really putting patients and families first and taking care of kids close to home. When the two of us talked about that, that was really the magic and the glue that really helped this ecosystem come together.

[A]

Amazing. And as I know you and many of our readers know, there's a lot of collaborations going on between pediatric hospitals and adult systems just trying to meet those gaps in pediatric care. So can you tell me a little bit more about how your model is structurally different from the existing pediatric referral network?

[B]

Yes. A lot of times when you. When you think about these networks, you know, it starts and remains transactional. You know, we do one thing that the adult Partner does something, and it's really paper driven or transactional driven. Shane and I, from day one said, you know, this, this, this cannot be transactional. This has to be transformational. This has to be last for generations. And so building something on transactions, in my opinion, is a recipe for failure once the leaders are gone. So building something that is embedded in our organizations, embedded into the community, that fundamentally the first question that we always ask is, well, what's best for those kids? And then the other pieces come in behind it. So it's not just referral pathways, it's not just physician recruitment. It really is how do we embed and become really collaborative partners around providing care that's really close to home in a way that is cost effective but very high quality and be able to spread some of that knowledge and that clinical expertise across a much broader spectrum.

[A]

Now, I'd love to hear on your side of things, Shane, what drove your system to pursue this opportunity with Nicholas Children's? And what did you hope to accomplish?

[C]

Bryan, thank you for having me. Today we have a lot of goals that Matt and I work together to accomplish, but really the first, and I'll give you a little background, just briefly, Broward Health was really the first pediatric unit, dating back almost 90 years here in our county. And we've always prioritized the care of our children. But over the years, our program, like many others, evolved into small children's hospitals, but they were embedded within our main campus, and we have services that were gastroenterology, oncology, neonatal, and all the other areas. But however, at the same time, programs like Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital and Nicholas Children's Hospital are growing, becoming larger, and kind of the big reputable organizations here in South Florida. But. But if you fast track then into the early 2000 and twenties, we really started to do a deeper dive and wanted to assess what would growth really look like, what would be necessary to move into this standalone hospital environment. We really wanted to evaluate why we were trying to compete with exceptional programs like Nicholas Children's hospital or Joe DiMaggio. And we had a real opportunity to figure out, do we do it on our own or do we kind of do it through collaboration? I'm a big believer in collaboration, and we thought that there would be no other, better partner than somebody that's already been here, been established, been in Dade county for many, many years, shared the same values. I would tell you that Matt Love and I have known each other in a lot of leadership roles across the state. We also both serve on the safety net alliance. And this is one of the bigger conversations. So our own pediatricians came to us and said, hey, do you think we could go it on our own, or would the collaborative route that you always talk about be in our best interest? And you know what? We said, well, instead of competing for more physicians and growing the number of staff and fragmenting the market, why don't we really look at collaborating? How do you create these operational efficiencies? How do we make sure that there's immediate access to all the experts? How do we generate economies of scale? And luckily, we said, whoa. You know, we have Matt Love just down the street there in Dade County. He's the CEO of Nicholas Children's Hospital, and he actually saw the same benefits of partnering with Broward Health. And so we started discussing how do we maximize our integration? How would it go and happen across all of Broward County? How do we become really the region's community health system? And so it gave us this real opportunity to have really a lot of internal work groups. I mean, our pediatricians here at Broward Health and the pediatricians at Nicholas Children's Hospital came together, and it didn't just happen overnight. I would say if Matt Love and I didn't have the strong relationship, friendship and trust, it would be very difficult to make something like this happen. A lot of these organizations exist in silos, and you heard Matt talking about the four walls. We said, how do we break everything down? How do we do. It's in the best interest of the parents, these children, the community, the physicians, and everybody else. And what we said was, how do we kind of make something that's the best of both worlds, for both systems? So after many, many months of conversations and in the reg March 1st, we were excited to actually flip the switch and go live at midnight. So we've really been broadening, you know, all the specialty care. Nicholas had already been, and Matt's always very generous. But Nicholas Children's Hospital has been in our backyard for over 20 years. And when I say backyard, I mean Broward County. So Broward county is a community of 2 million people. So it's one of the larger counties here in the state of Florida, and the largest county, the first one, is Dade County. And so this marriage and partnership between Broward Health and Nichol has really been magic. It's because the physicians worked well, the clinicians, the nurses, the work groups. And then after the regulatory process and flipping the switch, we're 60 days into something incredibly successful. This is something you could Ask Matt. But they've had some really neat procedures that were done for the very first time in our 90 year history here at Broward Health because of Nicholas Children's Hospital's physicians. So I would say that's just kind of some of the neat stuff that's happening. I think this is going to be really great on many levels, but really for the parents and children. When we had an issue, about 20% of the children did have to go down to Miami. We would send them to Nicholas, and as a result, the parents might have to get a hotel or take a day or two off of work to go back and forth. Even though Miami doesn't seem too far, it's still on a good day with traffic an hour and 20 minutes. So I think we've created something special here.

[A]

Absolutely. And this is quite an undertaking. I know you just said you're only 60 days into it, but I'd love to hear more about your broader vision. What are some of your long term pediatric care plans for your area?

[C]

That's great. So we want to. So you heard me say collaborative, right? I'm thrilled about the collaboration with, with Matthew Love and Nicholas Children's Hospital and his leadership. We've already taken it to the next level and we've proven to the people in the community that something like this could work. Right. There's a lot of people who say, is it going to really work? Is it beneficial for both? How does it benefit the community? We've been able to share that over the last 18 months to two years with our working groups and everyone together. But the last 60 days have been really the proof that's where the rubber meets the road and we've accomplished everything. But so what I think for long term pediatric care, I think if we could continue to partner, if we continue to do great with Nicholas Children's Hospital at Broward Health, I think Matt would agree that our ultimate goal is really for something much bigger. I don't want to jump out in front, but I would say at this point it's a little aspirational. But we've already started talking to other healthcare systems. We really envision and see something like what they have in Atlanta and Philadelphia, Chops and choa as a model. So we've been exploring how we can use the partnership between Broward Health and Nicholas Children's to launch a pediatric health network. So Broward county is a very dense, heavily populated area. But if you bring in Broward Dade in Palm beach, they are an incredibly large tri county region with or without traffic, it could take several hours to navigate between those three counties, over 6 million people. And our real core belief is that families shouldn't have to take off a day of work to navigate the distance or the traffic to ensure that their child has access to the best possible specialty care. So Matt and I have really been working as a team and as a group to start to pull others in. One of the other great partners that exist in our community is Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital. And so we think that down the road, our healthcare systems will be able to continue to expand, grow the partnership and more with these actual collaborations that we've been sharing with you.

[B]

This is a lot about vision, right around what's. What's best for kids here in Florida. And I think, you know, Shane used the word and I got to give him kudos so many times around collaboration, right? And we said this before, we put our egos aside, you know, being able to always take a step back and figure out, well, what's the best thing for kids? And ultimately, you know, that's our North Star. That's, I think, Shane's North Star. And a lot of folks in here in Florida. And so when you take a step back and you think about there's about four and a half, five million kids under the age of 18 or 20 here, here in our great state of Florida. And when you look across the country around some of these, my peers, right, Shane mentioned a couple in Atlanta and Philadelphia, you know, Boston, Columbus, I mean, there's a whole bunch of them. There's several in Texas. You know, what we have the ability to do here in Florida is to be in that same realm with all the kids in Florida and all the great healthcare, pediatric healthcare in Florida, bringing it together. There's no reason why we can't be better than many of those other organizations. I think that really is the vision and the collaboration and the cooperation that really brings us together to figure out, how do we do that. And to me, that's the exciting part. What's next?

[C]

I love that. I think, Matt, you nailed it because that's really the vision, right? We have interest from others that want to do this. Florida has 23 million people. You just mentioned the 4 or 5 million children that live here. And we don't have a Children's Hospital of Florida. So why can't these great pediatric organizations come together and really create more access, more efficiencies? I mean, look, I think we drive down the competition for subspecialty fissions, create economies of Scale that are financial beneficial for all, really, but making it more, I would say, better access for all the families and we keep the care close to home. Right. I mean, Matt could tell you, but we unfortunately have to refer a lot of people, not only out of the county, but out of the state. But going back to collaboration, you earlier said, right, about transformational, if you actually created a children's hospital here in Florida, what you'd have with Nicholas and Broward Health, the Children's Hospital Florida, if you bring some of those, you have something that would be generational. This might be a once in a lifetime opportunity where these organizations are not only really collaborating, partnering, working together. And the physicians have brought together all sorts of cross pollination when they have conversations with each other and they're actually helping us recruit. That's one thing we haven't spoken about. But doctors from across the country are seeing this new model. They're drawn to the academic medicine, they're drawn to the partnership, they're drawn together. These two large health care systems are actually working together.

[A]

Absolutely. You two are doing something really amazing down there in Florida. And as some of our readers might know, we here at Becker's published an article not too long ago now about the number of children's hospitals that are trying to do something like this. They're partnering with a lot of different adult systems. They're trying to create kind of a hub and spoke or an ecosystem style. But one of the issues they talked about was the finances. Of course, everyone is strapped for cash trying to make this viable. So Matt, if you could real quick give us an idea of how you manage the economics of creating an ecosystem like this and make it work for your participating health systems.

[B]

You know, that's a, that's a great question in pediatric health care. Right. For us, you know, we are in the Medicaid business. We're anywhere between 65 and 70% Medicaid. So, you know, keeping that in mind as we think about how do we make these systems work, these networks work. And I come back to, you know, something that I truly believe in is that it's, you know, it's got to be a win, win for, for everybody, both organizations and most importantly the kids in our community. So I've been happily married for, for 30 some years and I keep saying it's never been 50, 50, it's always been 60, 40, 80, 20, maybe 10, 90. But in the aggregate, we both have come out really, really, really good. And so I look at these relationships and these ecosystems in a similar way. Right. If we're really here for the long run, what needs to happen financially today versus next year versus five years down the road, it's going to ebb and flow. And when you look at it, that's truly what happens on partnerships over time. But one of the things that we truly know that we need to do is be able to make sure we're. We're efficient. Right. So how can we spread these costs over, you know, a larger infrastructure? How do we pull out costs so that there's not duplication of services all the time? So it's a balance between those two. In addition to, as you said, we see pediatric services being shut down across the country. Right. You know, there are pediatric deserts in parts of this state as well as across the country. And so we have to be able to spread cost over a larger volume, but also be able to consolidate and reduce that fragmentation. So I think by doing it on a multifaceted approach, it'll work, but it also has to come back, and it has to work for everybody involved. Things do not last when one organization wins and one organization loses. And that's not our philosophy. It's how do everybody win, and most importantly, how do the kids win and get access to this care close to home that they otherwise wouldn't have access to?

[A]

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Matt and Shane. This has been such a great discussion, and it was so good to hear about this program you're building. So thank you for joining me on the podcast.

[C]

Thank you for having us today.

[B]

Thank you.