Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning
in to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm Erica Carbajal.
And today, we're excited to be joined by
doctor Mark Mosley, president of USF Tampa General
Physicians.
Doctor Mosley, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so
much for taking the time to be on.
Yes. Thank you so much for having me.
Delighted to be here.
Absolutely. Well, to get us started, do you
mind just sharing a bit about your current
role and your background and how you got
there?
Sure.
I'm happy to. So I am president of
USF Tampa General Physicians. So
we're a managed service and physician practice,
that oversees the physicians of Tampa General Hospital
and the University of South Florida Morsani College
of Medicine. So we're an academic practice of
almost a thousand well, over a 1050 providers,
physicians, and advanced practice providers.
I hold a few other roles. I'm an
executive vice president in the TGH health system,
and I'm vice dean for clinical affairs in
the Morsani College of Medicine at the University
of South Florida. So,
I'm an emergency physician by training and background.
I went to the Ohio State University for
medical school and graduate school,
did my training in emergency medicine at a
place called Christianicare Health System in Wilmington, Delaware,
and then was an academic faculty member and
leader
at Ohio State for almost 12 years before
being recruited here in 2017
to to start as the chief medical officer
at USF. And then I've had a delightful
journey as the systems continued to grow. I've
been able to grow with it, which has
been, really wonderful.
Thanks for walking us through your background there.
I think
wide oversight there. As you mentioned, overseeing over
a 1050,
physicians and advanced practice providers. So within that,
can you share a little bit about
thinking back over the past year, your most
successful project or initiative
at Tampa General?
What did you do, and what were the
results?
Sure. There's there's so many things in many
ways. We're we're a bit of a a
a start up.
We have these two wonderful parent companies in
TGH and the University of South Florida, and
we're carving out this space in between. So
we're we're fortunate that we have a lot
of parental,
oversight and approval, but we're we're also
defining
the physician practice in the future. And
I think one of the most meaningful things
that we've been able to do
is to
ask some important questions about how we scale
infrastructure
in our practice assets for the future.
So much of the ambulatory world of healthcare
has been a bit of the Wild West
compared to the inpatient setting.
The inpatient setting for
decades has been focused on rigor around operations
and bed placement
and
quality and
other really
high data
and sophistication
around those topics,
the ambulatory setting really hasn't been that.
And so
what I've really enjoyed over the last
few years is bringing
insights from the inpatient setting
to the outpatient setting. Let me give you
an example. So at any given time, if
you ask a physician executive like me how
many of your exam rooms in your ambulatory
office buildings are full,
most of us wouldn't be able to answer
that question.
But if you ask a hospital chief operating
officer
how many beds are full in your hospital
at any given time, they could ask answer
that question with exact precision. So we're looking
at how can we do that in the
the so we can better manage our capacity?
Just like in the inpatient setting of the
hospital
where those beds are a precious resource, our
exam rooms in the ambulatory setting are a
precious scarce resource that we need to manage
effectively.
So why is that?
We need to manage it because
we don't have unlimited capital to go out
and buy a new building. We don't have
operational
funds to lease additional space. We need to
be operationally efficient and effective
in the space that we're in. So
we have some partners that we're working with
that are trying to do that. We took
500 rooms
in our largest clinic buildings, and we're trying
to run it much more like the inpatient
setting of the hospital with some analogies to
the operating room. We want our physicians and
providers to achieve a high level of room
utilization,
and we're gonna try and help them to
the best of our ability do that.
If they can't meet that room utilization goal
with our support and aid, we have to
look at how we can reallocate those resources.
Because, again, we we have to be accountable
stewards of the resources that we're given. And,
of course, that's a partnership. So what I've
really enjoyed about that, in addition to just
it's innovative, it's a chance
to do something differently and to take from
a part of medicine that we've done very
well
in recent years in the inpatient setting of
the hospital and put it in the outpatient
setting. It's just been the partnership with our
physicians, our providers, and our staff. I I
think that's been the real fun part just
to see the the light bulb or the
moment to say, hey. At any given time,
we know we have this unused capacity. Let's
go
Yeah. You raise a fascinating point there that
we truthfully don't hear
as much about just in terms of really
taking
factors of how well,
tightly managed and well known certain things are
on the inpatient setting and really bringing that,
integrating it into the outpatient setting.
Doctor Mosley, as you've gotten working on this
and it's kind of become a larger priority,
how physicians,
like, really responded there? Have they been engaged
in that and and and ready to take
on that that challenge and understanding the why
there?
Yeah. It's a it's a good question. I
think
change management is hard,
wherever we are, and, you know, we're all
guilty, I think, as leaders and in in
as big systems of sometimes
splitting rather than lumping. And I think what
we have to do is connect
our initiatives to a sense of why are
we doing it, how does it connect to
our shared purpose, our vision, our values,
Why are we doing this, and what are
the reasons that you should care about it?
And let's have that discussion fundamentally before we
talk about the particulars.
I find when I do that and I
talk to our physicians, our providers, and our
staff
about
why
we're doing things and what's the why behind
it and how it impacts patients,
how it impacts them,
I I find that it's a it's a
more productive discussion. It's an easier starting place.
And then, hopefully, we can tie that to
some of our strategic initiatives. All of us
have key performance indicators,
organizational action pillars.
You know, you can call them different things,
but we're all trying to be efficient and
effective in what we do.
And I think if we can tie that
to the sense of why and say we're
doing this because we also really want to
achieve our strategic goals, which hopefully,
in an academic health system, are linked to
our mission of serving patients and to the
community.
I find when I do that, and I'm,
you know, I'm not always effective like everybody
is in in doing that. But when I
am effective in doing that, I think those
discussions go really well because change is hard,
and there's a lot of it. Yeah. I
think some great points there just around
tying it back to efficiency and effectiveness, but
also the mission and the why of of
serving more patients and making sure we have
as much access as as possible,
doing what we can to provide that.
Well, doctor Mosley, looking ahead, what do you
see as really the biggest challenge, or what
are you really bracing for, expecting to face
in the next year or so, and how
are you preparing?
So
I was recently,
asked to be on a panel where we
where we answer some of these similar questions,
and I I think
there there's so much coming at us in
health care right now, so many challenges. I
I think if you think back to COVID
and coming out of COVID with a great
resignation,
we realized how vulnerable we were from a
workforce perspective.
So, I think like most organizations,
you know, we have
been thoughtful or at least tried to be
thoughtful of how how we approach that. There's,
of course, recruitment and retention of, you know,
world class staff and physicians and providers.
But but how do we invest in them?
How do we upscale them appropriately?
How do we deal with the fact that
we may have
staffing shortages in perpetuity in health care because
there just aren't enough people going into
particular areas. An example might be revenue cycle
on the physician practice side.
Right? You you don't go to college to
be
a revenue cycle specialist.
There's there's no degree for that.
Right? So how do we take somebody that
comes into our organization that has the good
raw skills, that has the connection to our
mission, vision, and values, wants to have a
sense of purpose and meaning in what they
do,
understands that the work that we do matters,
how do we take that good substrate,
and how do we skill them appropriately?
So that skilling is, you know, people skills,
leadership skills,
enhanced
roles and responsibilities, but it's also the application
of technology.
We need technology to be a force multiplier.
How do we do that?
You know, if you think about checking into
a doctor's office
or scheduling a doctor's appointment,
we're not particularly innovative in that.
And if you think back to, you know,
40 or 50 years ago, my my father-in-law
graduated from medical school in 1957.
And when you checked into his office in
the late 19 fifties, early sixties,
checking into an office is not a whole
lot different today. There may be some technological
enablement to it, but we have to get
better at that.
Right? We have to help be and and
it's not just being more consumer focused for
for patients that are tech savvy and want
to have multiple ways in how they interface
with us. It's helping our staff,
deal with their new realities.
I think all of us are trying to
keep up with the the monumental change that
we're seeing in the health care marketplace and
the demand for patients,
you know, the access challenges, the staffing challenges,
those are all across the country. That's not
unique to any particular system or area.
But I think what we're gonna be focused
on in the next year is really investing
in our people.
Right? How can we invest in our people?
How can we
give them
that connection to the purpose that's so meaningful,
that they wanna stay, they wanna invest in
our what we're doing,
right, for the betterment of our patients in
our community.
And there was a great study that was
recently published by Deloitte that looked at, Gen
z's
and millennials
in how they're changing the multigenerational
workspace.
And one of the key things and takeaways
from that article was
it's really incumbent on us as leaders to
connect people to a sense of purpose.
I'm not there to just hit a button
in the electronic medical record. I'm here to
help take care of patients.
And what I'm doing in the electronic medical
record
is a part of our high reliability
practice that delivers world class outcomes, which is
good for patients and good for the community.
Right? I think we have to do a
better job of telling stories about how we're
connecting those things. So for us and what
I see in the future in this coming
year, it's really investing in our people. It's
investing in appropriate technologies, using that technology,
as I mentioned before, to be a false
force multiplier,
to be innovative in the ways that we
do things,
and hopefully
be more efficient and effective so that we
can better achieve our mission and
service to the community.
Yeah. Doctor Mosley, I think a lot of
what you said just parallels to or speaks
to the reality that we hear from a
lot of leaders of that, you know, staffing
shortages are are here to stay and staffing
will always
be a priority.
But as you mentioned, how do we integrate
technology
and get people to see that investing in
tech
is part of investing and supporting staff for
the foreseeable future and really getting everyone to
understand,
the why there and how it can support
efficiency,
throughout the organization.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Well said.
Doctor Mosley, next here. How do you see
obviously, physician
c suite leaders are have a broad scope
of responsibility,
depending on
what area of an organization they work in
or the size of the system or hospital.
But generally or broadly speaking, how do you
see
physician c suite roles evolving in the coming
years?
Yeah. So that's such a great question because
it it might lead me to say something
that there's some hack for the future
that would allow us to be more successful
than we've been in the past.
I tend to be
somebody that looks to the past
to say what's always been true.
The author, Morgan Housel, has a book called
Same as Ever, where he talks about this
concept. And just sort of learning the things
that have always been true might help us
worry less about the future. So for me,
and for as a physician executive and what
I encourage our leaders to focus on is
what's always been true about leadership. Leadership's always
been hard. Right? It's always challenging.
We're always gonna have things that are uncertain
or ambiguous,
but there's ways that we can deal with
that complexity.
We can manage it
through sound blocking and tackling,
excellent communication.
Right? How do we how do we deal
with challenges with
physician alignment and engagement?
I've always found that communicating very clearly, effectively,
and consistently with people
really is helpful. Because if I behave erratically
as a leader, it's really hard to trust
me. And I think, ultimately, it comes down
to that.
You know, as a leader, we're trying to
build trust with the people that we work
with. We're trying to build trust with our
physician colleagues, our our provider colleagues, and our
and our team members. And in order to
do that, you have to be visible, you
have to communicate clearly,
you know, things like town hall meetings, answer