Every nine and a half minutes, Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital receives a new patient in its emergency department. Its academic medical center has 1,045 beds and is expanding to nearly 1,200 beds with construction on a new patient tower underway.
Regardless of a hospital or health system’s size, President and CEO John Couris sees care coordination as one of the most pressing challenges in healthcare.
Becker’s connected with Mr. Couris — who has led the seven-hospital system since 2017 — to discuss the industries from which he is taking notes and the cultural philosophy that shapes his leadership.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What is something the healthcare industry is not talking about enough?
John Couris: The healthcare industry needs to spend more time focused on care coordination. We need to do a better job at coordinating care from the ambulatory environment to the inpatient environment, to the post acute care environment, to the physician enterprise.
The lack of coordinating care efficiently and effectively, using the idea of a system of care centered on the patient and the provider, creates fragmentation, a disjointed environment and silos. It increases cost and has a profound effect on the value that the consumer of healthcare derives from their experience.
Customer is defined in three ways: the patient, the payer and the employer. We need to build a system like Apple built for their devices — a seamless, intuitive operating system. We’re not there yet. We as an industry need to spend a lot more time understanding care coordination.
Q: What is an industry or business outside of healthcare that you think leaders could take notes from?
JC: We can learn from several different industries based on the problem we’re trying to solve.
We had and continue to have some challenges with throughput in our academic medical center, which is 1,045 beds. We are very busy; every nine and a half minutes we get a new ED patient, and every 15 or 20 minutes we are filling an inpatient bed with a new patient. We engaged our partner, Palantir, to deploy engineers from the oil and gas business — where throughput is their biggest issue. We embedded an engineer to help us think through our challenges using that industry’s lens.
For technology, we’re learning a lot from Microsoft, and from companies like Apple, who have figured out how to build a consumer-centric system that drives quality, profitability and great consumer experiences. We can and should learn from other industries.
Q: If you could share one strategy with other health system CEOs, what would it be?
JC: It’s more of a cultural concept. Health system strategies, for the most part, are all variations of a theme. Every health system talks about needing to employ more doctors, either build or buy more hospitals, improve quality, lower cost, and expand ambulatory.
What I think is most important is culture, because when I spend time with other health systems and leaders, I notice that there are three things that are very different from system to system: people, culture, and an organization’s ability to execute on a plan.
We just completed our Press Ganey survey, and our team member engagement ranked in the 92nd percentile in the country, and 91% of our health system participated in the survey. That tells me that we have people that are connected, understand the strategies and the tactics, are committed, are supportive and are driving toward a set of goals.
We’ve built a cultural model based on the following: If you treat people and lead with authenticity, kindness, transparency and vulnerability, you drive higher degrees of engagement. You create a psychologically safe environment, and you drive trust up in the organization, and when people are engaged, they will run through a brick wall for you. When people feel safe and free of judgment, they will innovate, and they will create. They will be curious.
TGH and University of South Florida have grown exponentially across the state of Florida because of that model, because of our people and because of our culture. It’s not a specific strategy; it’s a philosophy.
Q: If you could go back in time 10 years, what would you tell yourself to start doing, or start learning about? What ended up being a bigger deal than it might have seemed at one point?
JC: I would tell myself my 35-year-old self to work on culture and people much earlier in my career.
We have a motto: Our team members come first, and our patients come second. If we as leaders show up as the best version of ourselves every day, and we give our team the very best, they can take care of each other and the patient — and the patient is the ultimate beneficiary.
