FEATURE EDITORIAL
FLORIDA HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION CHAIR
By Laura Hampton President and CEO of
Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Hugh Greene holds a master’s degree in
health administration from the Medical College of Virginia and a Master of Divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
Greene has served as board chair for the Jacksonville
Chamber of Commerce; JaxCare, which provided programs for the working uninsured; and the Sulzbacher Center, where he received the Excellence in Healthcare Award for efforts in providing health care to the homeless.
The Jacksonville Business Journal named Greene one of the
area’s 12 “Ultimate CEOs” in 2007, and in that same year, he was inducted into the First Coast Business Hall of Fame.
As Florida Hospital Association (FHA) chair, Greene advocates
on behalf of Florida hospitals in relevant state legislation and supports the organization’s initiatives to provide the highest possible care to the patients its members serve.
We sat down with Mr. Greene to talk about his work with FHA,
challenges in the current system and the future of the health care industry.
What will be the biggest challenges in the health care industry in the next year?
The biggest challenge we’re facing right now is major
reimbursement cuts. Over the last five years there have been $500 million in Medicaid cuts to Florida hospitals. This year the cut was 5.64 percent—so about $300 million.
Then turn to Medicare. I don’t care if Romney’s elected or
Obama’s re-elected—it doesn’t matter to me. We all know Medicare cuts are on the other side of this election. So when you start adding Medicare cuts on top of Medicaid cuts, we really do face a future in which we’re going to be paid less. So, what do hospitals do? What do physicians do?
We’ve reached this crisis, so what do we eliminate? The
choices are obvious. Do you eliminate employees? I hope not. Do you eliminate programs like mental health, which is already grossly underfunded? When you suddenly have all these additional cuts and you have programs that are losing money, do you pull back from those programs?
It’s like any other business. If you are losing money, you have
to do something different. When you are continually paid dramatically less year after year for what you’re doing, something gives. It just cannot, not give.
What would you like to accomplish this year as chair of the Florida Hospital Association board?
FHA is primarily an advocacy group in the industry. So we’ve
been spending all of our time, up to this point, trying to hold back these Medicaid cuts and then also to advocate on behalf of Florida hospitals on other things that are deemed to be detrimental to the welfare of hospitals.
26 On the other hand, one of the things I am most proud of with
FHA is major quality initiatives. We have several surgical care improvement initiatives among the Florida hospitals, in concert with the American College of Surgeons, to improve surgical outcomes—in particular, reducing surgical infections. I don’t know the number of hospitals in the state involved, but it’s big. We’ve really been spending our effort and energy to better involve hospitals and to learn from each other via best practices.
How is technology changing the patient/physician interaction and how hospitals do business?
Well, you can drop technology into at least three buckets—
clinical, pharmaceutical and information technology. The traditional bucket that people think about is clinical
technology. Five years ago, we didn’t own any kind of surgical robot, now we own three. We didn’t own high speed MRIs, where you can do the scan of an entire child in four seconds. There’s a continued explosion of that kind of clinical technology, which improves patient care.
There is a reason why you would have a gynecological
procedure done with a robot as opposed to someone going in with their hands and doing it. The robot allows you to do very fine surgery with less blood loss, less destruction of related tissue, and therefore recovery is much faster.
The other thing that continues to explode in our industry is
pharmaceutical technology. Think of various conditions, rather it be Lipitor related to cholesterol, whether it be the antiviral drugs related to HIV—huge continued progress every year. That’s a big driver in health care costs as well. Before these things come off patents, they’re very expensive. But, none the less, all of us want it. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
The third area of technology is information technology. We just
completed the conversion of our final hospital fully to electronic medical record. So, in all of our hospitals, there’s no paper being used at all in a clinical patient record anymore. We are also rapidly converting our doctor’s offices to an electronic record. And then we’re connecting them, so that your record will follow you, or information will be transmitted electronically. It’s huge. There’s great opportunity for patient care improvement.
If you’re in a hospital bed now, and the nurse is going to give
you a medication, they swipe their badge, they swipe the bar code on the medication, and they swipe the bar code on your wrist band. So we know who gave what to whom, when—and then the computer has the incredible ability, given the explosion in pharmaceutical technology, to say, whoa! Do you realize this dosage is not compatible to this patient’s weight? Or even, did you know this particular medicine is counter interactive with another medication this patient is taking? So, the computer has tremendous potential.
How does the push to decrease wait times in emergency rooms impact patient care?
The whole emergency room issue is kind of a complicated
one. The contradiction that’s always there for the patient is, the least sick person is often the one that ends up having to wait
2012-2013 The Greater Daytona Healthcare GuideTM
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196