Tampa General Hospital is a Florida-based academic health system and the primary teaching hospital for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. The organization operates a network of more than 170 care locations – including hospitals, outpatient centers, and specialty care facilities – across the state, with services spanning trauma, transplant, cancer, and critical care.
How has the definition of a modern hospital changed in recent years?
I think a consumer has to think about their healthcare and hospitals more as a system of care than as a campus with a collection of buildings. The industry is moving toward a patient-centered and provider-centric system of care with four key components. Patients move through those components based on acuity — their illness, injury, trauma, or preventative care needs.
The four components are ambulatory care, inpatient hospital care, post-acute care, and the physician enterprise, which traverses all three. [When acuity is low], patients spend most of their time in clinics, imaging centers, surgery centers, or health and wellness facilities. As acuity rises, they move into the hospital environment and then into post-acute care settings such as home health, rehab, or skilled nursing. It’s incumbent upon health systems to build a frictionless —or at least friction-light — system of care that improves access, convenience, and lowers cost.
As more care moves beyond the hospital campus, how do you maintain continuity and quality of care across different parts of the network?
It’s all built into the system of care. A real-life example is the TGH at Home program, our hospital-at-home program, which came out of COVID when the federal government allowed hospitals to provide hospital-level care in the home using technology. What we realized is that it’s a great and safe place to deliver care. By leveraging telehealth, remote telemetry, and other technologies, we can safely care for people at home.
When you talk to our providers and nurses, their satisfaction scores are in the top decile in the United States because they feel they’re practicing medicine the way they intended to — getting to know patients and families and understanding how they live. Patients love it, too, because they’re in familiar surroundings, around family and pets, and their dignity is increased. Our readmission rate from home back into the hospital is around six or seven percent, compared to the national average north of 10 percent. We’re now moving toward a ‘health system at home’ model with imaging, infusion, oncology, radiology, and lab services delivered directly into the home. It’s also far less expensive than building more hospitals.
Where do you see the greatest structural challenges facing health systems today?
One of the biggest structural challenges is fragmentation. Healthcare is filled with silos and disjointed parts, and when systems are fragmented, costs go up and quality goes down. Healthcare needs to become more intuitive, more friction-light, and more consumer-centered. I use Apple as an analogy — people love Apple because the ecosystem is intuitive, consistent, and designed around the user. Healthcare needs to think more like that.
Another issue is that as an industry, we are building too many hospitals. . Healthcare facilities are incredibly expensive to build, and yet the average occupancy rate for hospitals in Florida today is 66 percent. If hospitals cost anywhere from $2.5 million to $5 million per bed to build, do we really need more hospitals, or do we need to do a better job with what we already have? Building our way out of problems is unsustainable. There’s plenty of money in healthcare, but it’s not distributed correctly. We talk about paying for quality and value, but we don’t truly do it at scale in a way that changes the industry.
Where are you seeing the biggest operational impact from AI and predictive analytics today?
Right now, across our health system, we have more than 80 AI systems running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We started our AI journey on the clinical side, not the revenue side, because we wanted to redesign clinical pathways and improve quality, outcomes, and safety.
One of the first things we did was build an AI and predictive analytics platform to monitor sepsis in hospitals. Sepsis is the leading cause of death in hospitals in America, largely because it’s difficult to detect before it’s too late. In our academic medical center, our sepsis mortality rate is 5.3 percent, compared to the national average of roughly 15 to 18 percent. That means around a thousand people who otherwise would have died are alive today because of this technology. In our 8,000-square-foot care coordination command center, nurses monitor patients using 16 clinical indicators tracked by AI. If something changes physiologically, AI flags it, providers investigate, and care teams are dispatched immediately. That’s the power of AI in the clinical environment — improving outcomes, saving lives, and lowering costs.
What are the biggest challenges you are personally working to overcome right now?
A big challenge is change management and adoption. People tend to fear what they don’t understand, so a big part of our job is educating people about AI and our broader transformation journey so they don’t see it as a threat. Across industries, there are people actively resisting or sabotaging AI deployment because they fear for their livelihoods. Our job as leaders is to walk hand in hand with people, show them understanding, be transparent, educate them, and demystify what we’re doing.
Another challenge is speed. I tell people all the time: I don’t need to be bigger than you, smarter than you, or have more money than you — I just have to be faster than you. We need to deploy technologies quickly, learn from mistakes quickly, and iterate quickly. But speed can be unsettling, so we have to balance innovation with people’s comfort levels. We focus on leading authentically, leading with love and kindness, being transparent, and leading with vulnerability. When we do that, team member engagement, psychological safety, and trust improve — and organizational performance improves in a sustainable and reliable way.
