Joel EngelhardtTampa General CEO John Couris refutes justification so many specialty medical services give for landing in Palm Beach County.
For insight into why Tampa General Hospital is buying doctor’s practices and investing in Palm Beach County, we offer short takes from Tampa General CEO John Couris, who once led Jupiter Medical Center.
Couris hosted about 150 doctors, health care professionals and community members for dinner and a presentation Wednesday at the Kravis Center’s Cohen Pavilion. Answering questions from former WPTV news anchor Ashleigh Walters, he spoke for 35 minutes from a comfortable chair to an audience seated in a casual mix of straight-back and lounge chairs.
He emphasized the academic nature of Tampa General, a 981-bed not-for-profit hospital and academic health system based since 1927 on Hillsborough Bay in Tampa. We’ve gathered some of his comments here by subject:
Why is Tampa General investing heavily in Palm Beach County?
“Now, what you probably hear a lot of … from other systems is, we’re coming to Palm Beach, because the Palm Beach residents, they need and want world class health care. … My comment to those folks who do say that and only say that, is, ‘Why aren’t you in Lake Okeechobee? Why aren’t you taking care of migrant workers? Why aren’t you in the sugar cane fields helping those patients out? Because you’re not here for everybody. You’re here because this part of Palm Beach is wealthy, well-heeled. It’s a great demographic.
“Well, we’re here for that, too. We want to access philanthropy. We want to be in well-heeled communities. … But we’re also here to take care of those that are less fortunate. These are the farm workers. These are the waitresses. These are the landscapers. These are the people that tend to be forgotten. And when people say you’re really here for that? We are.”
Why not build a hospital here?
“Right now we’re feeling like maybe that’s not the right decision. … We’re going to be building clinics that are going to dot the landscape from, I’m giving you my perspective, from basically Boca to Tequesta and everything in between. We’ll build a massive ambulatory network, surgery centers, imaging centers, clinics, think, everything but a hospital. Why not partner with the hospitals that are already in the community? Why would we unnecessarily compete?”
Why partner with Mass General Brigham, the hospital system where Couris got his professional start, on a 20,000-square-foot oncology center in Legacy Place in Palm Beach Gardens?
“We’re building out a very traditional, classical world class academic health system for the entire state with Mass General Brigham. This is just the start. There is a much bigger vision at play. … This is not like we’re just coming here for a little swath of the geography. We’re coming here and we’re going to stay here, and we’re going to design it in a way that’s for everybody.”
Of note: Tampa General Hospital Foundation recently hired Janine Boylan, a Palm Beach Gardens native, as executive director of development and major gifts. She held a similar role for 14 years at the Jupiter Medical Center Foundation. Couris was CEO at Jupiter Medical from 2010 to 2017.
Why partner with the Health Care District of Palm Beach County to run Lakeside Medical Center, an underused, taxpayer-supported 70-bed hospital in Belle Glade?
“The entire focus is to take care of the less fortunate in the community, because everyone deserves to access world class health care, not just the select few that can afford it. It should be a God-given right to access care, not a privilege that you get because you live in a certain area or you’ve done well for yourself.”
As an academic health system, he noted, he needs patients.
“We’re an organization that’s designed around taking care of the rare and complex. Well, you have to have a wide net to catch the rare and complex and bring them into your academic health system, so you can train the residents, you can train the fellows. They can see a diverse set of our population, a diverse set of illnesses and diseases. And so we have to bring that into the academic medical center, and that’s another reason why we’re here.”
And, he noted, the importance of rural health care.
“We believe, by the way, in rural health care. If rural health care fails in the United States, and if rural health care fails in a state like Florida, the entire health system could collapse because we couldn’t handle the volume and what would ensue if that happened. So we want to be part of the solution. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to write them a check. We want to roll up our sleeves and build a strong and resilient hospital for people that live in those communities.”
End note: Tampa General appointed Ron Doncaster vice president of business operations and integration at Lakeside. Doncaster served as interim chief operating officer at Tampa General and also worked for five years at Mass General.
