New hospital CEO brings world experience to Zephyrhills

Douglas Duffield's career as a hospital administrator took an indirect route from the high tech world of Microsoft to sub-Saharan Africa to Pasco County, where he recently was named chief executive officer of Florida Hospital Zephyrhills.

Duffield joined the hospital administration in January as chief operating officer. The merger this summer between Adventist Health System and University Community Health paved the way for his promotion after hospital President John R. Harding was named CEO of the newly-established Florida Hospital Tampa Bay Region.

"The merger is going to bring a lot of benefits to the Tampa Bay region," Duffield said. "My focus is to serve this community and expand access to care right here in Zephyrhills."

One of his primary goals is to reduce and eliminate unnecessary wait times for patients during doctor visits. There's no reason, he said, for a routine doctor's visit to last two hours when most patients can be treated in 30 minutes or less.

"When I look into the future, I see no-wait clinics," he said.

As COO, Duffield helped implement new procedures to streamline medical visits.

"It's not just working faster," he said. "It's taking the waste and inefficiency that causes you to wait. One of the things we do is pre-register patients before they arrive so they don't have to sit around in the waiting room when they get here."

The hospital's recently expanded and digitized emergency department will help reduce wait times for emergency room visits, as well, he said.

Duffield said he taps into his background as a software developer for such firms as Intel and Microsoft to increase efficiency in the delivery of medical care. It's a skill set that taken him all over the world, including the small African nation of Lesotho. Duffield and his wife spent their first year of marriage working at a faith-based hospital where they tracked the AIDS pandemic, established a computer training school and helped oversee major capital building projects.

"HIV and AIDS was very real in this country," Duffield said. "When you get there, you realized that everyone you meet has lost someone to AIDS."

Duffield also spent five years at Sonora Regional Medical Center, another Adventist hospital, in northern California. Transferring to Florida Hospital Zephyrhills - a 154-bed hospital with 1,000 employees - presented a unique challenge, he said.

"I was just outside of Yosemite National Park," Duffield said. "The community I was in was rural, and it had a large retirement population. In Zephyrhills, I had to get used to the seasonality - the fact that the population doubles from summer to winter. That's something I never had to deal with before."

After spending most of his life in the Pacific Northwest, Duffield also had to get used to Florida's odd seasons and humid climate. He laughs now as he reflects on his first week in the Sunshine State and his misconceptions about Florida's typically mild winters.

"We booked a week at Sanibel Island," Duffield recalls. "The kids were so excited - we thought we'd go shelling on the beach. It was 22 degrees outside. We spent the whole week huddled together in the room trying to stay warm. We turned the thermostat all the way up, but I don't think it ever got above 60 degrees."