Hugh Greene: 'We are accountable to the community'

The homeless, working people who lack healthcare insurance, and many others in northeast Florida all can attest to the impact of Hugh Greene's civic leadership in the Jacksonville area.

Greene, president and CEO of Baptist Health, sees that leadership as part and parcel of the health system's community ownership. “We don't have stockholders,” he says. “We are ultimately accountable to the community. … That's who we work for; that's who we answer to. They're our owners. I believe that very strongly.” Greene counts a Master's in Divinity among his degrees, and before his move into healthcare pastored a church for five years.

As board chairman at the Sulzbacher Center for the Homeless, Greene helped to develop the first federally qualified health center in the country affiliated with a homeless center, which now serves about 200 people a day. “Hugh is a visionary leader who thought far ahead of his time when helping develop the clinic,” says Cindy Funkhouser, president and CEO of the center.

From Greene's standpoint, the effort brought a string of pleasant surprises, from renovating the “dilapidated old warehouse” where the shelter is housed into “something humans could inhabit,” to the annual fashion show fundraiser that features homeless people—and their stories—which he worried at first would seem disrespectful to them.

“It actually had the opposite effect: They so badly wanted to participate, wanted their story told, wanted their moment on the stage,” Greene says. “It's quite an emotive event, as you can imagine.”

Greene, 60, one of 10 finalists for Modern Healthcare's 2013 Community Leadership Award, also helped launch and served as board chairman for JaxCare, a public-private partnership established in 2003 that provided more affordable health insurance for workers who had gone without coverage. The effort, which has since become part of a voluntary system to care for the uninsured called We Care, benefited greatly from Greene's passion and leadership, says Rhonda Davis Poirier, former executive director of JaxCare, who hoped he would help—but hesitated to ask.

“I knew Hugh's leadership would be pivotal to success. I also recognized that the project would benefit one of Hugh's competitors far more than his own hospital, while requiring significant resources from his and other health systems,” says Poirier, who is now president and CEO of consultancy Trega Partners International.

“Having 50 million people uninsured in the most sophisticated democracy on the face of this Earth is a travesty,” Greene says. “Coverage expansion is a very important issue to me.” He describes We Care as “JaxCare, phase 2,” which began with primary-care participants and is rolling out slowly to specialists, and which has taken “a fair amount of intellectual energy, in trying to figure out how to make this work.”