Orthopedic surgeon Wayne Mosley, MD, of Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth has spent this year breathing life into an old hospital space and creating a specialty facility.
Dr. Mosley joined "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss how he is approaching the top challenges and growing the hospital's market share.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: At AdventHealth, what are some of the biggest headwinds that you're planning for the next 12 months or so? What's really top of mind for you?
Dr. Wayne Mosley: We made a commitment [in 2023] to open up an operating room suite in a hospital that is part of the AdventHealth Sebring Hospital. It's got three operating rooms, and it was basically discontinued. It'd been kept up because of the Joint Commission but it wasn't being utilized, and so we made that decision to convert that to a mini orthopedic hospital, and that's probably our biggest challenge that we're facing, is getting that off the ground. The administration has been excellent about revamping it and renovating areas, but there were a lot of things that just had to be done, such as pure processing of some of the operating room equipment. We've all been living through this logistical nightmare of trying to get things. And so getting some of that equipment is taking longer than what it did before COVID-19. That's our biggest headwind, and after that there's personnel.
[We're] trying to find competent orthopedic surgeons that are skilled, that we can bring here, that will work in a cooperative fashion with us, where we work as a team. I learned how important that was in the military to take a team approach. We want people that will come here provide good care, integrate into the community and be willing to help each other out.
Q: How do you take the clinical hat off and put the administrative hat on when you're trying to build out an additional service line, or just complete some of these projects?
WM: I probably don't ever take the clinical hat off. It has to be on. It has to shape what I'm doing. It has to make sense. It has to be good orthopedic care, or nothing makes sense. So I always leave that on, and I add management hat on to it.
Growing up on a farm taught me a lot about how to effectively work with and manage people. Same thing with the military. You've got to recognize who the stakeholders are in any kind of endeavor. You've got to make sure that they're buying in. You have to make sure that they're even more than buying in, that they're going to be active participants and they're going to help the process.
Some training that I've had throughout my life in business certainly helps me to be more critical of things from a financial standpoint. Every surgeon just can't get their own personal laser anymore. We have to be very judicious about how we spend our capital, and we've done that. We've only spent it on the things that we absolutely need and the things that will help us build to what our goal is of having an Orthopedic Center of Excellence here in South Central Florida.
Q: Where do you see some of the best opportunities for additional growth going forward?
WM: My administration is very straightforward and they're very fair, and when they hired me for this project, I said, 'We're getting 20% market share, and we want 70%.' I'm constantly thinking about growth. The first thing I want to do is to stem the tide of those folks who are in our area who think that they have to travel to the coast for better care. We've got to change that on our front with better physicians, with better facilities, with better equipment, and we're working diligently on doing that.
The second thing is we think we can be wildly efficient when we're in our Orthopedic Center. We want to be able to attract people to come into our area. We want to look at some of the other outlying areas and see if they'll travel to us … The difficult part is, you've got to travel up I-4, you gotta cross these streets, and then you gotta park 500 yards away from the hospital. What we're proposing to do is [have patients travel] Highway 27 and park 20 yards from the hospital. They're not just a number, they're an individual. That's what we think we're going to do, and we're going to focus our efforts to grow our market share.