Interview: Heather Havericak, CEO

Florida biosciences snapshot:

93,534

bioscience employment. 6,700

bioscience establishments. $705 million

National Institute of Health funding, FY2019. $1.27 billion

bioscience venture capital investments, 2016-19. $1.53 billion

academic bioscience R+D expenditures, FY2018.

Source: Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance Heather Havericak

CEO Broward Health Medical Center/Salah Foundation Children’s Hospital

What have been some highlights for Broward Health Medical Center?

Broward Health Medical Center has stayed completely focused on our strategic planning and growth, despite the pandemic. We expanded our South Florida Transplant Center in which we’re now doing livers and kidneys. We’ve done a lot of work around our minimally invasive surgery and the utilization of robots, which has allowed us to become a Robotics Center of Excellence. We also started our first class of surgical residents as part of our Graduate Medical Education (GME) program. As you start to look at the gaps in physician specialties over the next 10 to 20 years, general surgeons are going to be among those. We want to make sure that our GME programs always match what our residency programs look like. The other thing I’m particularly proud of is that we completed the final phase of our Salah Foundation Children’s Hospital with the completion of our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

How are you improving access to minority communities?

We have a robust community health services division that focuses on the health outcomes of some of our disparate populations. One example is in our high risk maternal fetal medicine program that allows for some of our community that may be in a disparate population to have access to all the essential services required. There are navigators who make sure that people aren’t falling through the cracks and are connected with care at the hospital. Our team works very closely with that group.

What are some of the challenges associated with the large migration of people to South Florida?

We’re already looking at the data, specifically di erent age categories, to understand what kind of services will be needed to align with community demand. It’s not just looking at services that we immediately need but what those services are going to look like in five, 10, and 15 years based on this influx of population.

Jared Smith

CEO – Broward Health Coral Springs

We had to respond to the pandemic and, fortunately, we took the right steps early on, which included activating our response plan, educating the community and our caregivers about the virus, and preparing the hospital with the appropriate resources and PPE. An incredible amount of e ort went into building infrastructure, including tents outside the emergency room, to converting spaces into ICU rooms overnight. Our caregivers were truly heroic and stepped up to the crisis at hand. Today, treatments, protocols and medications have changed. Our physicians have worked very hard to make sure they’re up to date. It was quite a whirlwind of a year. Hopefully, now that we are vaccinating the public, we are heading in the right direction as a community, a healthcare system and a country.

Academic research and development in the bioscience field totaled $1.53 billion in 2018

financial flexibility and conservative all fixed-rate debt structure. We also believe Broward Health maintains an adequate enterprise portfolio, with a good business position in northern Broward,” S&P said in its statement accompanying the announcement.

Not all systems were able to withstand the pandemic impact, however. Holy Cross Health is eliminating an unspecified number of support staff starting with the first quarter of 2021, the Sun Sentinel reported. It attributed the cuts to COVID-19.

To bolster the sector, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance has worked with the private sector to retain and even add jobs in the region, including in the healthcare sector. KeySource Pharma is opening a new 8,000 square foot sales and logistics facility in Broward County and healthcare finance firm Bankers Healthcare Group invested $42 million in the area.

Looking ahead Broward County is poised to emerge from the postCOVID world in good shape, in large part because of its large, interconnected healthcare systems. A growing population will be met by expanding healthcare infrastructure and workforce. Legislative challenges remain statewide regarding expanding health services to underserved populations but some hope the changed federal landscape may somewhat mitigate some of the political resistance in the state.

The county’s vaccination rates, already in line with most of the country, and better within the most vulnerable communities, are expanding into younger age cohorts, which bodes well for the recovery.

A growing number of healthcare workers, meanwhile, are entering the industry, particularly in the nursing field, spurred by cooperation between local higher-education institutions and the healthcare networks. Population growth, however, is outpacing growth in the healthcare sector, which remains a concern. But even here, the county’s healthcare institutions are aware and taking steps to address the growth. “Broward County has a growing population. We plan to continue building our tertiary-care services and provide a higher level of care. We’ll continue expanding our cardiac program by adding to our physical capacity and adding additional capability,” Jared Smith, CEO of Broward Health Coral Springs, told Invest:.

Education:

2020 was an unprecedented year for education, one of the hardest hit areas of the economy and a segment that saw an almost complete overhaul of how learning is delivered. With the COVID-19 vaccine now widely available, optimism is returning that the future of the education sector is bright, even if it ends up looking different.