I came to Steward because the position offered a good opportunity and an opportunity to do good. The "good opportunity" was the chance to work within a physician-led organization providing high quality, efficient and low-cost care to patients close to where they live. The potential of working with an organization that was receptive to input from caregivers, and that was nimble enough to quickly respond to ideas about ways to improve patient care, was unique in my experience with other academic medical centers. Steward provides the environment where new procedures in patient care algorithms can be developed, deployed and their outcome assessed quickly.
The employees within the healthcare system have uniformly been enthusiastic to have new challenges and about new challenges and frontiers in the types of patients and types of procedures that are being performed here. These individuals are also eager to prove that they can achieve the same or better outcomes than employees at other medical centers. This creates a very invigorating and positive work environment in which there is the potential to accomplish a lot. The "opportunity to do good" was the chance to work within the Steward network, which serves a larger and more geographically diffuse population then any single hospital or medical center.
Working within the Steward network, one has the opportunity to be able to reach out and help care for patients at much more distant sites, patients who may not have the opportunity to travel to a more centralized academic institution. At times, this opportunity translates to outpatient clinics or consultations at the patient's home hospital. At other times, it can relate to developing treatment algorithms that can be applied system-wide to specific problems. The opportunity to do good also means the ability to bring procedures and surgical interventions to these individuals, that they would not otherwise have been able to access at their local level.