on Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Jennifer Yeagley, M.A., Gulf Coast Jewish Family & Community Services
It’s not every day that you step into an air shower before touring a mouse clinic, but at Leadership Tampa, anything can happen.
Leadership Tampa ‘18’s Health Care Day began with a trip to Moffitt Cancer Center, the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in the state of Florida. Moffitt, which is also ranked the #6 cancer hospital in the nation by US News World & Report, sees sixty thousand patients per year who travel from across the globe to receive its top-notch services and benefit from its research.
Our class not only learned about Moffitt’s wide reach and the $2.1B impact it has on our state’s economy, but also heard from a panel of experts discussing the future of healthcare. The consensus of the panel, which included leaders from CIGNA, Florida Blue, BayCare and Tampa General Hospital, was that data and technology will drive the more patient-centered approach to which the healthcare industry is – by necessity – shifting. Technology is often viewed as a barrier to meaningful engagement, but in the healthcare industry, the opposite is true. Technology solutions can help drive more information on trends in population health, cut healthcare costs over the long run, improve physician engagement and allow patients to become more proactive in management of their healthcare needs. The panel also stressed the importance of considering social determinants in determining and implementing healthcare solutions for diverse populations: technology alone cannot solve the structural and behavioral challenges that many patients face in accessing quality care.
Next up: air showers.
Following the panel discussion, the class of 2018 descended underground for a tour of the Moffitt Vivarium, or “mouse clinic,” as tour guide and Director of Comparative Medicine, Robert Engelman, called it. To enter the clinic, we first pulled booties over our feet and paper lab coats over our clothing, after which we were sealed in a small glass chamber and doused with air. This readied us to enter the vivarium, where we got a crash course in how studying the molecular genomics of mice translates to much of the cutting-edge research done upstairs at Moffitt.
We spent the afternoon at the Center for Advanced Medical Learning & Simulation (CAMLS) in downtown Tampa. Adjacent to the planned site for University of South Florida’s (USF) new medical school campus, CAMLS is a state-of-the-art simulation training center, using the latest advances in healthcare to train tomorrow’s medical practitioners. At CAMLS, we heard from the CEO of Tampa General Hospital, John Couris, who spoke to the importance of the Hospital’s role as a teaching center affiliated with USF’s medical and nursing schools and its pivotal position as an institution serving those with financial and other barriers to accessing care. Tampa General Hospital provides 50% of the free medical care received in the state of Florida.
While at CAMLS, we also learned from Dr. Charles Lockwood, the Dean of USF Health, about the exciting opportunities that the new USF medical school campus, part of the Water Street development project, will bring to both the school and to the downtown area. The tour of CAMLS was both fascinating and surreal as we saw life-sized, fully computerized mannequins move in response to medical intervention, like wrapping a tourniquet around an injured leg.
Perhaps the most moving part of our day, however, was hearing from Dr. Debbie Rinde-Hoffman, director of Tampa General Hospital’s cardiac transplantation team, and a panel of three heart transplant recipients. These individuals are what drove everything else we learned over the course of the day home: in the end, healthcare is about the people on the receiving end. It’s about the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and friends who are in need of care, understanding and support. Behind all of the data, technology, research, theory, learning, positioning, financial planning and strategy are patients. People. And in the case of the panel we heard from, people who were days, if not hours, away from death who are now thriving because other people cared for them at a critical time in the best possible way. Without people’s capacity for compassion and empathy, the business of healthcare would neither be possible nor would matter. Of all the fascinating takeaways of the day, this reminder of the power of compassion and care was maybe the most poignant.