HEALTHCARE INTERVIEW
Long-term care Emphasizing patient care beyond the hospital stay helps maintain patient health, and reduces the cost of healthcare
Mike Schultz President & CEO, West Florida Division AdventHealth place. This helps with maintaining health, reducing cost of healthcare and gets us in a space where we are directly connected to the patient. We have been intentional in making sure our consumers have a wide variety of access to different sites of service based on cost. This allows them to make the smart decision and not go to an emergency room for a simple cough that could be treated at a physician’s office or an Urgent Care Center. We want to be transparent about the costs in healthcare so that consumers can make educated decisions regarding their medical needs.
Why has your organization decided to focus on preventative healthcare? One of the key aspects of preventive healthcare is our model of never discharging a patient. Historically, hospitals wheel out their patients and wave goodbye to them. We have taken the stance that we don’t ever want to discharge a patient. A visit may end, but we connect with our patients before they leave any of our facilities and ask them if we can assist them through the next level of care. That may be a follow-up visit, a better dietary regiment or access to medication. We offer 95% of our 200,000-plus annual patients access to care navigation and a large percentage of our patients accept the offer. That is a way of making sure they don’t go home and start repeating the same actions that brought them to the hospital in the first 122 | Invest: Tampa Bay 2020 | HEALTHCARE
What challenges emerge from providing healthcare to diverse demographics, younger and older populations? In many markets in and around Tampa Bay we are seeing a more elderly population moving in. Retirees are starting to discover the beauty of Tampa Bay. But in general Tampa Bay is a fast-growing, diverse community and it is a large geographic area. The key to addressing the healthcare needs of the diverse demographics is to ensure close to home access points, and the ability to connect any time any where. We also believe we need to make every effort to make healthcare more affordable. Perhaps the way of the future is to help change the reimbursement model. Currently, you pay when you are sick, a health system is incentivized to provide services to get you well. What if we changed that? For example: a health system might get $10,000 a year regardless if you are well or sick. If you get sick, and it cost the health system $25,000 to take care of you, it loses money. If the health system keeps you well, and able to keep medical cost at $5,000 because it was proactive in looking out for your wellness, the system makes money.
