How Nemours Children's Health Is Leading the Way in Redefining Pediatric Care

President and CEO R. Lawrence Moss is striving to create health, not just deliver medical care for children.

As healthcare grapples with a wide array of challenges that pose a threat to the industry's future, improving children's health looms as a potential answer to drive sustainability for the system.

At Nemours Children's Health, president and CEO R. Lawrence Moss, MD, FACS, FAAP, is focused on advocating for the value of investing in childhood prevention, while strategizing for where children's health is heading.

The United States has a massive burden of chronic disease, one that could be significantly lessened by addressing health trajectories in children, according to Moss. That burden is creating problems in several areas, from the $4.5 trillion in annual costs, to the strain on providers' resources to care for patients.

"The biggest issue for me continues to be our opportunity to do a better job demonstrating that children's health is not just about treating sick kids," Moss told HealthLeaders. "Children's health is about the health of our entire country, it's about the health of our economy, and it's about our future.

"One of the things that that I always try to do, that I think the whole children's hospital industry can do a better job of, is demonstrating that children's health is the lever we have to power our society and our economy. I just get out of bed every day thinking about that because if we could do a better job of that, the shiny object challenges of the day would tend to fade away."

For Moss and Nemours, the priority is advancing whole child health models that promote health, development, and wellbeing over the course of a child's life. Those models are influencing how children's health is trending and the type of medical care children's hospitals are emphasizing.

With higher acuity in inpatient settings and more care being administered at home and in outpatient settings, Moss believes the children's hospital of the future will be a giant ICU with only acute care beds. Meanwhile, most of the care that is delivered in the medical-surgical unit today will be delivered at home.

"At Nemours, we're investing very heavily in something that we call advanced pediatric care at home, which is essentially hospital-level care at home, which we are actively testing and moving very rapidly towards becoming a part of the way that we deliver care here," Moss said. "I hope that we're able to demonstrate to other children's health systems around the country that that's the way to go."

Pictured: R. Lawrence Moss, MD, FACS, FAAP, president and CEO, Nemours Children's Health.

Moss is also bullish on new technology allowing for more innovation in children's health.

By leveraging AI to improve care management and care coordination at a sophisticated level, children's hospitals can scale a major hurdle that currently places limitations on providers.

"In the children's healthcare world, our biggest challenge is the subset of kids we call children with medical complexity," Moss said. "Those are the kids with multiple congenital anomalies, complicated cancer, other types of birth defects, the kind of things that that require what only a children's hospital can do. Yet coordinating that care requires multiple specialists in a variety of procedures and it's the thing we do poorly in healthcare, is deliver that in a coordinated, efficient fashion."

Nemours is partnering with a startup company that's looking at ways to create a virtual care coordinator and care manager to give the health system "essentially an unlimited workforce of roles that are really, really hard to fill," according to Moss. That partnership has yet to be officially announced, but Moss is excited by the opportunity and expects it to greatly benefit children's families.

Additionally, Nemours has been active with capital investments in its home states of Delaware and Florida to strengthen care delivery efforts. While Nemours is interested in delivering population health and elevating children's health outside the hospital, it also wants to care for the sickest of kids, Moss pointed out.

"An emphasis on health outside of the hospital and keeping kids out of the hospital is not a de-emphasis on high-end tertiary quaternary care for kids who need that," Moss said.

In December, the health system announced it would spend $130 million in 2025 on projects in Delaware, including a new Maternal and Fetal Health Program and expansion of its neonatology, cancer and cardiology programs.

At its Central Florida campus, Nemours is investing $300 million over the next four years on expanding the pediatric hospital, building a new surgery center, and building a new administrative building.

"We're finding with the increased visibility we've had in the market and with how responsive communities and families have been through our whole child health model, we've seen a big increase in demand for our high-end tertiary quaternary services, so more kids who maybe were going somewhere else are now coming to us for those services and we need to be there to deliver," Moss said.

Taking care of the sick will always be a core function of hospitals, but bettering the health of communities in a meaningful way requires a comprehensive approach.

"Whether we're leaders in healthcare or we're at the front lines taking care of patients, our job is to create health," Moss said.

"It's health. It's not just medical care."