By the time Tenet Healthcare acquired St. Mary’s Medical Center in 2001, the hospital had officially entered an identity crisis. In struggling to keep pace with industry changes, the West Palm Beach-based facility had floundered financially in its final years as a not-for-profit hospital. By the time Davide Carbone stepped in as CEO in 2006, St. Mary’s had become so unsure about how to move forward that it wasn’t moving at all.
“The hospital had a wonderful past and wonderful legacy and is a vital resource to the community, but it was treading water to figure out which direction to go in, in a world of constant change, especially in the health care universe,” Carbone says.
Despite coming in with a successful track record — Carbone spearheaded a major financial turnaround at Aventura Hospital and Medical Center as its former CEO — he had a big job ahead of him.
“The hospital had really not been advancing, had not been progressing, and people were concerned,” he says. “But they were also comfortable with what they were doing. One reason that the hospital wasn’t progressing or meeting the needs for growth was because they weren’t changing, and I became a change agent.”
Find an identity
To stabilize St. Mary’s financially, Carbone had to get its more than 1,600 employees and members of the community on board with some major changes needed to turn the hospital around. This was easier said than done.
“There was a large contingent in the community that easily wanted to see St. Mary’s go back to the old days that they remember fondly, but that was not practical,” Carbone says. “That’s not reality.”
Carbone needed to gain the support of the community and unite people around a new vision for St. Mary’s. The problem was that the hospital was perceived by community members in very different ways.
“This hospital had a glorious background and kind of fell into a trough and was having a hard time pulling itself out of it,” Carbone says. “It lives under the cloud of a lot of people’s impressions that we’re just a charity hospital or we’re just a trauma hospital or just a Catholic hospital.”
As a faith-based hospital, St. Mary’s is one of the highest providers of charity care in South Florida. It also functions as a level-one trauma center and a community hospital. Carbone wanted to show the community that St. Mary’s encompassed not one, but all of these things, and financially, it wasn’t a failing or destitute organization, but it had lots of potential and was still providing great services.
He decided the first step in re-establishing the hospital’s identity with the community was instituting a new logo that honored the legacy of the hospital while acting as a symbol for a fresh start.
“It seems trivial, but I think it gives people something to rally around,” Carbone says. “We all want to follow a leader. We want to follow success.
“In this case, it was just getting people motivated and getting them to see a vision of what could possibly be at St. Mary’s versus what had been at St. Mary’s.”
By getting the community excited about change and a new vision, people could start embracing change without feeling like they were abandoning the roots of St. Mary’s. Carbone refocused the hospital’s marketing and image-building efforts to generate excitement in the community about its goals.
He encouraged St. Mary’s staff to work proactively with the media. Giving the media more opportunities to learn about the hospital’s services and facilities, St. Mary’s began getting positive media attention instead of negative. This attention played a large part in renewing communication and building trust with community members, many of whom were Carbone’s biggest skeptics.
“Sometimes that criticism is legitimate and warranted, and sometimes it’s due to a lack of understanding,” Carbone says. “A lot of that is just communication.
“People have to see you as somebody they can trust and somebody you can believe in. As you develop that level of trust, people are much more willing to work with you and take risks with you.”
