Rebrand brings AdventHealth

Florida Hospital gets new name to reflect its growth, broader mission for healthcare

Florida Hospital, its parent company, Adventist Health System, and all its facilities are taking on a new name — AdventHealth — to reflect a unified system that’s headquartered in Altamonte Springs, spans almost a dozen states and has more than 1,000 care locations, the health system announced on Tuesday.

The name change will be effective Jan. 2, 2019, and signs will be updated in the following months. For instance, Florida Hospital Orlando will become AdventHealth Orlando.

“The word advent means the coming of something of significance, and for us, it has two powerful purposes,” Florida Hospital president and CEO Daryl Tol said. “One is the signaling of the coming to this mindset — this customer focus, this future of health care — and also to religious people it has a deep significance.”

The health system’s name change is not a result of a merger, acquisition or change in ownership; its sponsoring organization remains the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“I think it's very exciting because I'm not sure people in the community know the reach of [Adventist Health System],” Orlando Mayor

Buddy Dyer said. “They’re making a smart move.”

The name change is part of major investments in recent years, starting with the “Someday” ad campaign, which has been hinting at some of the elements of change underway across the health system.

Florida Hospital recently launched a secret project called Fulcrum to create internal disruption and kill the old health-care model.

“‘Someday is now,’ is going to be the message that you’ll start seeing after Aug. 14,” Tol said.

Adventist Health System has been working on the rebranding for nearly two years, starting with a panel that studied the topic.

“[The panel] came up with the concept that people actually trust system hospitals to a much greater degree than stand-alone hospitals,” Tol said. “So the recommendation was we need to go from this fragmented individualized branding to a national brand.”

Some of the other Adventist Health System hospital brands to change their names include Central Texas Medical Center, ParkRidgeHealth in North Carolina, Shawnee Mission Health in Kansas, Murray Medical Center in Georgia, Metroplex Health System in Texas and Gordon Hospital in Georgia.

“It’s going to be phenomenal for Orlando because this is the hub of a national company. … this is not a community hospital. This is a nationally leading hospital and this change will make it very clear to great physicians that their reputation will be benefited by being a part of this,” said Tol.

When Dr. Cynthia Gries, a lung transplant pulmonologist, was approached three years ago to join Florida Hospital, she didn’t know anything about it.

“I was practicing on another side of the country and I said, ‘which hospital in Florida?’ ” said Gries on Tuesday, after the unveiling ceremony for AdventHealth. “Because it wasn’t on the national stage, I didn’t know. But now I can say I work for AdventHealth and people will know.”

To show that there’s more to the name change, the health system announced several initiatives that point toward its mission of “wholeperson care,” and emphasize better connectivity across the system.

“[Patients] should expect when they go to an AdventHealth entity that’s not a hospital that those entities will be more connected so that they don’t just feel like pieces of a puzzle scattered around town,” said Tol.

The health system is also growing an array of technology to help patients better access their doctors, medical records and medical bills and making its patient portal HelloWell a more integral part of care.

AdventHealth’s virtual care platform, eCare, will be available to the public for free during the month of January, said Tol.

AdventHealth will also launch next year the Center for Genomic Health to move toward personalized medicine.

“We can start to customize care for you and share that information with your doctor, make it a part of your medical record and part of the prescribing decisions of those physicians and treatment decisions,” said Tol.

The health system is also changing patient care outside of the hospital. All physician practices will add new questions to their history form to assess the patients’ emotional well-being. Some of the questions include “Do you have joy in your life? Do you have a sense of peace? Do you have someone in your life who loves you?”

“We believe that the brand can become known nationally for whole-personal clinical excellence that is fully connected and with a person for a lifetime,” said Tol. “When you think about how abruptly different that is from the typical American health care today, that’s our aspiration and we’re going to fight our way there over the next decade and it will be tangible. People will feel that sense of progress in motion.”