Casey Guber, incoming CEO of HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke’s and Rocky Mountain Children’s in Denver, has spent nearly 16 years with Denver-based HCA HealthONE, part of Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare. He joined the system as an unpaid intern, is a graduate of HCA Healthcare’s COO Development Program, and most recently served as CEO of HCA HealthONE Rose, also in Denver, since 2020.
On July 20, Mr. Guber will become president and CEO of HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke’s, a tertiary care hospital known for cancer care and transplant services, and HCA HealthONE Rocky Mountain Children’s, a pediatric hospital with more than 300 affiliated specialists and subspecialists.
The move is also personal. His mother, daughter and he himself have all been patients at HCA HealthONE Presbyterian St. Luke’s, while his father, uncles and son were born at HCA HealthONE Rose.
He recently spoke with Becker’s about the transition, his leadership philosophy and the challenges facing healthcare executives.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: You expanded service lines at Rose while also improving physician and colleague engagement. Many CEOs feel like growth and culture can compete for attention, especially with current financial and operational pressures. How do you pursue both simultaneously?
Casey Guber: I think it’s almost like a hierarchy of need standpoint, and I think my philosophy has always been you have to have a strong culture and a foundation of operations with excellent quality, so that you can then accelerate growth in the key service lines that your hospital is known for, your hospital’s pursuing. I think that’s going to be the continued approach that I take, is making sure we have unbelievable colleague engagement and pride and unbelievable physician partnerships, so that we can have honest conversations and progress opportunities to again serve our community.
Q: Where do you believe AI can create the most meaningful value over the next two to three years, and where do you think expectations may be getting ahead of reality?
CG: I think it’s just such an emerging field that we’re going to see how those opportunities present itself, and I think HCA has used AI and various things, whether it’s imaging modalities to identify lung nodules, whether it’s ambient listening, and I think we’re all learning as an industry. I think the size and scale of our company, as well as the resources that are invested into figuring out how to use this from a clinical perspective and operational perspective, are hopefully going to help define the future of healthcare.
Q: You have spent much of your career with HCA. What is one leadership principle or operational discipline from HCA that you think other systems could benefit from adopting?
CG: My leadership philosophy is always our single greatest resource is our colleagues, and I think that is a philosophy I’m going to carry forward. When you layer that on with leadership and organizational development, you can usually accelerate results within the stability of how people are growing and how people are investing into the programs and the continuity of care.
How do we continue to support our caregivers, how do we continue to listen, how do we continue to partner with our physicians, so that we can get the best kind of clinical product and service line to truly care for our community? I think we do it in a really servant approach, and I think that’s generally the right perspective.
Q: When you look across healthcare, is there a challenge you think CEOs aren’t talking about enough right now?
CG: We have a lot of common challenges, whether it’s workforce, whether it’s policy and regulatory challenges, whether it’s new regulations that are coming down, whether it’s cuts and payments. Healthcare is a challenging environment, and I think our moral compass continues to be how we truly serve the community. We all got into this for a reason, and that’s to help prop up the caregivers, so that they have the tools and equipment to again just provide world-class care to the people that we’re serving, and that’s not without challenges right now.
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