Brian Keeley on Transitions, 50 Years with Baptist Health

The retiring CEO shares his career journey, Baptist Health's growth and success, and the organization's culture.

Baptist Health South Florida, a nonprofit health system headquartered in Coral Gable, Florida, is experiencing leadership transitions for its CEO and COO this year.

Brian Keeley, who has served as CEO of the organization since 1995, is retiring at the end of the fiscal year, which is September 2022 for Baptist Health.

Albert "Bo" Boulenger, who has been with the organization for over 35 years and most recently serves as COO and president, will succeed Keeley as CEO in October. A search for the next COO is currently underway.

Keeley's leaving ends a 50-year tenure with the organization, which he originally joined in 1969 as an administrative resident. He was instrumental in the growth of the 300-bed Baptist Health hospital to the now 12-hospital, 2,800-bed health system.

Recently, he spoke with HealthLeaders about his career journey, Baptist Health's growth and success, and the organization's culture.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: Last summer, you announced your plans to retire in 2022. How did you and the organization come to that decision?

Brian Keeley: We started that dialogue about three years ago. Our chairman of the board, James Carr, said, 'I want to establish a task force' in terms of the board dealing with my retirement and other executives. We called it the Transition Committee.

I was going to retire earlier but two things happened: Baptist acquired several hospitals in Palm Beach: Boca Raton Community Hospital and Bethesda Health. We were just putting those online and the board decided it was not a good time for me to leave until we got them under our belt. We were going into high gear with that spurt of growth in Palm Beach and then the pandemic hit.

The Transition Committee did a quiet search with some consultants on the outside. We did a national search and we interviewed people either remotely or we flew up to their offices, unbeknownst to anybody other than the five members of the board. That process started about two and a half years ago and it ended with our announcement that I was going to retire this September, at the end of the fiscal year.

We've been in this transition stage with Bo Boulenger, his position is president and COO. When I leave, he will be the CEO and the president. We currently have a search underway for a new COO.

I told the board, 'You don't have to worry about Brian Keeley leaving because you're in the best of hands.' Bo Boulenger is the best candidate for this position in my estimation. He's smart, he's articulate, he's been there more than 30 years. The senior executives are the best in the business. This is the best management team I've had in my 50 years.

Baptist Health is in a strong strategic position. We are the most preferred healthcare organization in South Florida, the largest in South Florida, and we'll continue our success.

HL: What will you be focusing on between now and September and how are you working with Bo Boulenger for a smooth leadership transition?

Keeley: I gave up my position as president and kept my position as CEO. Bo absorbed all other responsibilities like legal, managed care, finance, all the major functions within the organization.

My job is to focus on long-term strategic planning; long-term for us is three to five years out.

We're involved in several mergers and acquisitions, which is going to be a responsibility I hold onto.

Another one is philanthropy. We've put philanthropy into high gear right now. We've had our best year in philanthropy and we're seeing major gifts that are coming in right now.

We opened up an innovation center about three years ago, and we're going to be spending a lot more money on innovation. That's important as part of our national mission.

Also, I will be involved in board education, board development, and recruitment. What we found is that we had a board that was not representative of the community in terms of diversity and inclusion. We've expanded the board to bring more women and people of color in, and the board right now is exceptional, and that was one of my responsibilities.

Other than that, Bo assumed full responsibility for day-to-day operations. He and I have a great relationship; we meet and talk once a day or so. I give him advice, but I don't tell him what to do because he's smarter than I am. We enjoy a good relationship and we're in a transition stage right now. I'm going to gradually back away from some more responsibilities, and he'll be absorbing this. When it happens, no one will even know. It'll be a smooth transition, which you don't normally see, especially when you bring in people from the outside. So that's something that we have planned, which is important for not only the community, but also important for our doctors and our employees.

HL: What has made you stay with Baptist Health South Florida for 50 years, and what are you most proud of accomplishing?

Keeley: When I first came in 1969, I was here as an administrative fellow. I was in graduate school at George Washington University and that fellowship only lasted a year. After that, that was during the Vietnam War, and I spent time in the Medical Service Corps of the Navy. When I finished with the Navy, I decided to come back to Miami to Baptist.

When I came down here, I had no intention of staying any longer than three to five years. We didn't anticipate anywhere near the growth that we're experiencing right now. We never anticipated we were going to be a large integrated healthcare system. We never realized we were going to be from Palm Beach down to the Keys.

How I stayed so long as we kept on growing, I was promoted and promoted again. The CEO left in 1986 and I was promoted to the CEO position of Baptist Hospital. During the M&A period in the 1990s, we made the decision that we were going to either be bought or we were going to start buying. The rationale behind that was very simple— that we were too small in terms of capturing the economies of scale or having a critical mass, so we wanted to be larger. We merged with South Miami Hospital, and then we merged with Homestead Hospital, and then we merged with some hospitals down south.

That took us through 2010, then we started accelerating. We increased and expanded our service area from greater Miami to go all the way down to the Keys on all the way up to Palm Beach.

Our goal and our mission is to be the most preferred health system in South Florida, and we define South Florida from Palm Beach to the Keys. So that's where we are today. I think we've achieved our goal right now, but we have a lot more work to do. We're building more hospitals and more outpatient centers. We don't want to be the biggest, we just want to be the best.

I'm proud of being involved with the amazing culture of Baptist, which is all about people; that's the defining characteristic of the organization.

That's the reason we won the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 22 years in a row. That reconfirms my strong belief that if you treat your people well, they'll treat your patients well. And that's what this is all about; having the highest level of patient engagement and satisfaction, which is the reason that we've been so successful. When you walk in, you can sense it's part of the culture of Baptist Health. The culture is the glue that holds us all together.

HL: What do you hope your legacy as a healthcare leader will be?

Keeley: Leaving an organization that continues to be the very best at what we do. We are a nonprofit, mission-driven organization. We don't have shareholders, we have stakeholders. Those stakeholders are our patients, our doctors, our nurses, our employees, our board members, and everybody in our community. Our goal is to provide them healthcare and our aspirational goal is to be the best at what we do, and to provide world class healthcare so you never have to leave South Florida.

We made a conclusion a number of years ago that we can't be the best of everything. We decided to focus on four centers of excellence, we call them institutes:

1. Cancer
2. Cardiovascular
3. Neuroscience
4. Orthopedics and sports medicine
    

The reason we chose those four is that as the population grows older, those are the areas that are growing the fastest, and those are going to be where the biggest demand is for the future. We're going to start with hiring luminary physicians to lead those endeavors, we're going to recruit from the best health systems and the best academic medical centers in the country to staff those areas, and we're going to have the best technology in the world.

We want to make sure that we can tell people that if you live in South Florida, there's no reason you have to leave South Florida because we have the best. And that's a legacy I think we're leaving with the people behind us.

HL: What parting advice do you have for other healthcare organizations CEOs and C-suite executives?

Keeley: Stay focused on your mission and your vision.

That is the reason we expanded our service area from greater Miami only to Palm Beach. We asked, 'Do we want to be great? Or do we want to be big?' And we said, 'we want to be great,' and that's how we ended up choosing that.

In terms of personal advice, when you get to a point where you're talking about being a world class institution, you have to be humble. You can't brag about how good of a CEO you are. That's the advice I tell people; our success has nothing with Brian Keeley. Our success has everything to do with 25,000 caring and compassionate employees, world-class doctors, great nurses, and everybody in the organization. That's what makes Baptist Health so great.