Eric Fletcher assumed the newly developed role of executive vice president and chief strategy officer at Baptist Health of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville on July 28, and brings more than 30 years of leadership experience in nonprofit, community-based healthcare.
Prior to joining Baptist Health, Mr. Fletcher served as senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Fredericksburg, Va.-based Mary Washington Healthcare.
He told Becker’s he’s excited about his new role at Baptist Health, which operates six hospitals as well as emergency centers and hundreds of outpatient and imaging locations throughout Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. He discussed his priorities in the first year, the path to sustaining financial stability, and collaborations that have been particularly impactful for Baptist Health.
Editor’s note: Responses are lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: You’re stepping into this new role at a time of rapid growth in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. What are your top strategic priorities in the first six to 12 months to ensure Baptist Health scales effectively with the community?
Eric Fletcher: Whenever you have rapid population growth, making sure you can provide access to high-quality care is absolutely critical. So the access equation is still very important — that can be multi-pronged. From a strategic perspective, it certainly is increasing the number of physicians and the use of advanced practice providers, but it’s also virtual. And how do you leverage virtual? And ultimately, there’s still brick-and-mortar development as well that could be needed in a growing region — which is the case here.
There are also opportunities to work with like-minded systems on a more regional, collaborative basis — on initiatives that can help both systems save money, or multiple systems save money, and also maybe provide more coordinated tertiary-level care.
One of the things that Baptist Health launched a few years ago was something called Coastal Community Health. And that network right now — it’s Baptist Health, and Brunswick-based Southeast Georgia Health System as the members — and effectively, they’ve had a lot of success with supply chain, for instance, and saving both organizations money there. There are some other things that the organizations are discussing, but those collaborative efforts — across state lines and across regional lines — can be mutually beneficial.
Q: How do you see Baptist Health balancing expansion and innovation with financial sustainability, especially amid ongoing industry cost pressures and reimbursement challenges?
EF: We’re fortunate at Baptist Health that we’re on solid financial ground. That’s not the case for many health systems, but that is also, in this industry, something that feels fleeting, and so you can’t become complacent just because there’s a solid financial footing right now. And you’ve got to make sure that the investments that we make are right for the system and right for serving the people in this region. You can quickly squander a solid financial footing if you’re not careful in this industry. So we’ll move with caution, but at the same time, we’re going to accelerate our efforts around access. We feel like the equation — if the access is there, and we know our quality is there — that a lot of the rest takes care of itself.
Q: You’ve led major strategic initiatives and partnerships in prior roles. What types of collaborations or care models do you believe will be most impactful for Baptist Health moving forward?
EF: Baptist Health in Jacksonville has had success over many years with some key collaborations. That has brought the country’s leading cancer specialists and cancer research capabilities and findings directly to the residents of Jacksonville.
And those types of collaborations can really help, and I look forward to more of those. We also have Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital here, where Nemours Children’s Health, Jacksonville is a key partner — they provide the physician component to Wolfson’s. And that’s another one where organizations, doing what’s squarely within their core competence and doing what’s best, have created something better than either one could have themselves.
And so those kinds of partnerships that are true win-wins — we look for those too, as another way that you can gain a strategic advantage.
Q: What drew you to Baptist Health?
EF: Baptist Health was attractive to me, and I know to a lot of my colleagues, to work with a system that truly is invested in its local and regional community — you don’t get that everywhere — and here at Baptist, you do. You’ve got 15,000 teammates, and they live and work here in the region, and we spend a lot of time and energy understanding the community, building programs that really help people. Our food insufficiency programs here are outstanding.
There’s a mission component. There’s a reason you get up every day to do the job that you do, and that is very strong here at Baptist. We’re here to make sure that we improve the lives of the people that we serve in this region. You get to see that work every day here — it’s endemic to what we do.
