Stephanie D. Conners, President and CEO of BayCare Health System, received the inaugural Louise Whitfield Carnegie Award for Leadership Excellence in Healthcare from the TIAA Institute in collaboration with Becker’s Healthcare. The award recognizes healthcare leaders whose vision and service reflect an enduring commitment to excellence in healthcare leadership, employee value proposition, and community impact.
Leadership and Innovation
Under Conners’ leadership, BayCare has grown into the largest academic healthcare provider in West Central Florida, operating 16 hospitals with a 17th under construction and hundreds of outpatient facilities serving one-third of the region’s healthcare needs. She is leading BayCare’s $2.9 billion investment to close gaps across the care continuum, from quaternary care to home-based medicine.
Her innovations include the region’s first proton therapy accelerator, a virtual hospital model, an AI partnership to reduce clinician cognitive burden, and a Stress First Aid program developed in partnership with the American Nurses Association Enterprise to support frontline caregiver wellbeing.
Career and Impact
Conners began her career as a hospital volunteer candy striper and bedside nurse before becoming one of the country’s youngest chief nurses and one of the first five Six Sigma Black Belts in healthcare. She leads a system of 34,000 team members that returns an estimated $500 million annually in community benefit.
The Louise Whitfield Carnegie Award is named in honor of Louise Whitfield Carnegie, a philanthropist whose leadership of the Carnegie Corporation of New York helped advance health, education, and social progress in early twentieth-century America. Her husband, Andrew Carnegie, founded TIAA in 1918 to help educators retire securely.
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