Caitlin Stella With Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital

Intro: [00:00:01] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in South Florida. It’s time for South Florida Business Radio now. Here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Canter here, another episode of South Florida Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Diaz Trade Law, your customs expert today on South Florida Business Radio, we have Caitlin Stella with the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. Welcome, Caitlin.

Caitlin Stella: [00:00:34] Hi, Lee. Thank you so much for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:37] I am so excited to be talking to you. For the two people out there who don’t know, tell us a little bit about Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. How are you serving folks?

Caitlin Stella: [00:00:46] Absolutely. Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital has been a part of the community for many years. I think we’ve been around I think 30 years is the anniversary. And we started as a small pediatric unit inside Memorial Regional Hospital. And then Joe DiMaggio lent his name to the hospital in 1992. I can tell you that story, actually. It’s an interesting one. And then we’ve grown over the years, first into a freestanding four story children’s hospital, and we just added four more stories to the children’s hospital. So we now have 216 beds where a quaternary center, we do everything from broken bones with a nationally ranked orthopedic children’s orthopedic program largest in the state. We have a nationally ranked cardiac program. We do heart transplants, one of the only two programs in the state. We do kidney transplant, neurosurgery, oncology, everything in between. So we have a variety of medical and surgical specialties that we serve families all throughout South Florida and beyond. We also have a large facility in Palm Beach County in Wellington, and we’re actually opening another facility, not a hospital, but ambulatory services in Miramar. And we’re continuing to grow. We have offices all over the tri county area. So yeah, it’s a very special place. We’re also very well known for our patient experience. We have a very unique patient experience here at Joe DiMaggio. We were actually the first children’s hospital in the world to have a designation called Plain Tree. It’s from an organization called Plain Tree, which is about person centered design, which means that we design all of our programs and services around the child and the child’s needs developmentally, the needs of the family, and then the needs of the team. But the child is the center of everything we do, and we have really outstanding different kinds of designations and awards related to our patient experience because it’s very, very unique. And we often hear from kids that they feel like they’re not in a children’s hospital and they want to stay. So I feel like we’re doing a good job now.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:05] Why is it important for a community to have a children’s hospital like Joe DiMaggio, like instead of just having a pediatric center as part of another, you know, a subset of a of a larger hospital? Like, why is it important to kind of have its own space?

Caitlin Stella: [00:03:21] It’s extremely important. So first and foremost, children are not little adults. So environmentally, it’s very important that we have a space that is developmentally appropriate for kids of all ages. So an environment that’s not intimidating or scary, things that are anxiety reducing and sort of like a whole infrastructure of services and programs that really help prevent children from being afraid to come either to this hospital or any hospital, because you really are setting the stage for especially for kids that have chronic illnesses. You really can have medical trauma over time if the environment is not appropriate for the child and the care. And I can tell you many stories of examples of things that happened to a child in a place that was not set up to take care of a child. It sometimes can prolong treatment and certainly create more fear and anxiety than necessary. So that’s why being in a children’s hospital, particularly like ours, which is separate and it’s only children, allows us to create a very unique space where things happen that wouldn’t necessarily happen in an adult hospital. Sometimes I think they should. But just creating fun, creating distraction, creating activities that have much more to do with development, like things like art therapy and music therapy, fun making, making things as fun as they possibly can be, even if it’s a really difficult time. So it’s a very important that we have all of that infrastructure and services and programs that are set up for a child and their needs.

Caitlin Stella: [00:05:03] And some kids have many specialties. So like if they have a particular diagnosis, they need to go see multiple doctors or they need to come. For multiple treatments or some of them come here regularly, once a week, once a month or whatever. And it’s very distracting, not only for their own structure of their lives, meaning school and friends and siblings. So it takes them out of those norms and they have to come to the hospital. So we like to incorporate those things back in so they don’t feel like they’re missing any part of the structure of their lives that make kids kids. So we have a lot of those things in place, including our own school teacher. He’s here full time. They’re able to stay on task if they’re going to be here and they don’t miss any of their studies. We have lots of outside programing that comes in that’s enriching, entertaining, entertaining, educational. And we bring in a lot of things like yoga therapy or yesterday we had a theatrical performance. So there was something for kids to do to get out of their rooms. And we let them drive around in their own little cars so they can have some fun when they’re getting around and freedom and control and all of those things. So it’s a great place and it’s a very unique place. Of all the children’s hospitals I’ve been in.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:23] Now, as a leader of an organization like that, is it? I don’t know. I don’t know if strange is the right word, but in in a children’s hospital environment, all of those things you describe sound wonderful and they seem like perfect makes perfect sense that you would have them there. But for adults, you wouldn’t even consider that. Like you’re trying to get the adult in and out of there as quickly as possible. Like how why is there such a disconnect between how we think it’s appropriate to care for children and how we think it’s appropriate to care for adults?

Caitlin Stella: [00:06:58] I got to be honest with you, I don’t really know because I actually really have been a proponent over the years of looking at children’s hospitals as a model for things to integrate into adult hospitals to help with care. And I’ll give you an example. There are a lot of populations that are similar. I mean, you think about, you know, very elderly adults, older adults that have sensitivity to touch. They might have thin skin, they might be hard to get an IV into. They might be seeing multiple specialists, They might have dementia and have a hard time understanding things. So you have to explain things to them in a certain way. You might have cultural issues, you might have linguistic issues, you may have. So what what we do in the Children’s Hospital is very much about providing tools and techniques for, for example, if it’s if it’s a baby and we need to put an IV in, we use different kinds of equipment and we use different kinds of approaches and we use specialized team members. And so so that we minimize pain. And we only have to give the child the IV one time. I don’t know why we don’t do that with with older adults are very similar. They have very similar issues physically. Same thing with understanding what’s happening to you. So with children in a children’s hospital, if you’re diagnosed with cancer and you’re four years old, how we explain it to you and what we show you so you understand what’s happening to you and the techniques that we use with child life specialists.

Caitlin Stella: [00:08:29] And that’s a role that only exists in a children’s hospital. And it’s really there to explain to the child and developmentally appropriate terms what’s happening to them. How we explain cancer at age four is different than how we explain cancer at age 14. To me, that’s very similar to how you would explain what’s happening to, like I said, someone with dementia, someone with a developmental disability, and I’m talking to adults, you have to really think of like developmentally what’s appropriate and that goes through the entire lifespan. So to be honest, I’ve never really understood why we only have those kinds of things here. I’ve been a big proponent of trying to pilot some of those same programs in the adult hospitals. And I have to say in the health system where part of memorial health care system, we actually do quite a bit of that because we do have music therapy and art therapy and even animal assisted therapy even in our adult hospital. So I think we do a good job and I think adult medicine is starting to adopt some of those practices, but they’ve been long standing in children’s hospitals.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:32] Now, is your background always been with children?

Caitlin Stella: [00:09:36] Yes, my undergraduate degree was in child development, so I studied that. I come from a big family too. I’m the second of seven kids, so I kind of I grew up in a learning lab of child development. My mom’s a teacher, so we always were very well educated and always had activities that were age appropriate in my house. But then I also have a master’s degree from UCLA in public health, so I kind of married child development with public health. And then, yeah, I pretty much have worked in children’s hospitals my whole career. I did some consulting over time with some adult hospitals and different like some health care insurance companies and biotech companies and pharma and stuff like that. Because as I was going through my early days of my career, I really thought that was the way to learn the health care system. So I worked for C and I was a consultant and it really was a great education because it kind of I started my career in the Autism Center at UCLA. I got my master’s, I went into consulting. I learned sort of the US health care system, if you will, living all over the country as a consultant and really then went back to the children’s hospital environment at Children’s of LA and then back at UCLA and now here at Joe DiMaggio. So I’ve always kind of found my way back to the pediatric environment, which is really what I love. I mean, I’m a kid at heart. I will tell you, I’m not my friends will tell you I should say that that I am not your traditional CEO.

Caitlin Stella: [00:11:10] I like to talk to the kids. I like to look like I like approachable. I don’t wear suits. I try to play with them. I try to get them to tell me how their experiences are. I want to hear from them firsthand. Do you like the food? Are you comfortable? Is your bed comfortable? Have you made friends here? Do you go to school? Do you like it? Just the comforts and actually they inspire me. I love talking to the kids because as we were doing our construction project, for example, we had planned out quite a bit of the space. But as I talk to the children here and knowing that the weather in South Florida is beautiful, we decided that we would incorporate an outdoor play space into our construction When we added the four stories because many of the children told me that they want. To go outside. They wanted to go outside and do their rehab. They wanted to go outside and take a walk. They wanted their parents to go outside with them or their family members. And so we incorporated that into our plans. Same thing with like our play space. So the hospital’s very dedicated, and the theme of the building is the healing power of play. And we decided to not only put play rooms on every floor, which we have on our units, but then we decided to go all in and we built a Garth Brooks Teammates for Kids Child lives zone, which is a whole zone for really enriching activities so that children want to leave their rooms and go and socialize, which is really important because you can get very isolated here when you’re in a hospital by yourself or with your parents, and it gets very isolating for the whole family.

Caitlin Stella: [00:12:50] So the zone is great because it’s kind of like it reminds me of like being on a cruise or something where every day you get a laundry list of of different activities that are happening in the zone and you can choose, Do you want to come up for the theatrical performance? Do you want to come up for the game show? If you don’t want to come, but you want to participate, you can do it from your room. We have something called Jodie TV and you can watch the game show on TV and we’ll bring you a prize if you win. So it’s a way for them to engage and socialize. And it’s really been beautiful to watch because I go up to the child zone every day, and if you just hang out up there, you’ll see kids wander in for the first time and they’re like, Wow, this place is awesome. There are video games, there’s air hockey, and then there are things that are really meant to be more medically, like educational. There’s no we’re not. It’s a no white code zone. It’s only for play. But they can go up there and have some fun, which I love to watch.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:48] Now, one of the challenges in leading a health care facility like yours is fundraising. How do you found that you’re this empathetic management style In this empathetic way you treat your patients and their families has helped in the fundraising area is that you kind of cement that bond with the people who are financially supporting a lot of the efforts that you have ongoing in order to keep growing and keep serving the community.

Caitlin Stella: [00:14:21] Absolutely. I do believe that anybody that’s had an experience here at DiMaggio Children’s Hospital with any of our services at either at the main hospital or at our outpatient locations, it’s very common that you speak to someone in the community and they’ve had someone in their family or know someone who had some kind of experience here, either their baby was born here and they were in the nick. You their child broke their bones. Someone had major surgery. We do a lot of like air and ground transport for trauma. So maybe you had a tragic story of a child that did well here. Or so there’s I feel like this community, many, many people have a story that goes back to some interaction that they had with Joe DiMaggio and what just what a great place it was, no matter what. Sometimes the outcomes aren’t optimal, but they had a good experience with the team or the environment, or they felt that love, they felt that environment, they felt that that feeling that I’ve described, where we try to have that empathy and everything that we do. And I do believe that there is there’s a perceived value in that, like parents and family members and the community at large appreciate that this resource is here. I always say that we’re very fortunate to be the community’s children’s hospital, and the community’s also very fortunate to have such a special place here, and that has translated to more support for the hospital. As we’ve grown and we’ve had our capital campaign. We have a capital campaign going now called Catch the Love. It’s help us grow this building. It’s going to continue to help us grow services like behavioral health and expand our emergency services. And so we’re continuing to raise money. But I do believe that this community does value that because people have had an experience here and they have felt that environment or they felt that empathy for their own family or know somebody. So it definitely has helped.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:14] And then as we’re coming out of the pandemic, I’m sure the needs haven’t diminished. You know, where South Florida is such a high growth area, people moving from all over the planet to South Florida, you know, to handle such a diverse population, you know, in the numbers that are there, it must be challenging by itself.

Caitlin Stella: [00:16:36] Oh, yeah. I mean, the community continues to grow and grow and we definitely have seen people move from all over. And actually we created a program called the Concierge just to help with that exact thing, because some families that are moving here have children with known health care needs. And so when you move to a new city, the first thing you do when you have a kid with a chronic illness is fine Children’s hospital, you’re going to make your home base. So kids here is just great because it can help you get plugged in to the right specialists and the right treatments. And if there’s something ongoing, know, like I said, we have kids that are here regularly, so kids here has been great. And even if they’re from out of town or maybe they live here part time because, you know, we have a lot of seasonal people here, too. Again, we’re able to kind of have a resource for them to get their care down here for whenever they’re here. But that that’s one aspect. The other aspect is it’s really shown us that we need to keep growing our services with the population’s growing, the population of children are growing and in certain areas because, you know, South Florida is not really all that easy to get around. Sometimes if you don’t have convenient care close to home, then it makes it really difficult. And like I said, it’s very disruptive for a child to leave school and keep driving to the hospital or not be able to participate in sports because they have to go to the hospital for care every week, you know. So we like to bring our services close to home so we have more and more outposts in the community so it’s less disruptive. And we’ll continue to do that based on community needs.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:11] And you mentioned the good weather. They’re going to take advantage of it through those outdoor areas. I mean, the good weather also, I’m sure, is a reason there are so many air visits because people are playing and they’re, you know, getting hurt maybe more often. They are in other communities where it’s not perfect weather, you know, every single day.

Caitlin Stella: [00:18:30] Yeah. You know what I’ve learned? I’ve been all over the country, and especially when I consult in children’s hospitals, kids will find a way to get hurt, whether it’s snow or ice or if it’s the beach or whatever. But no, it is true. I think that is one of the reasons why our our Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital Orthopedic Institute. And then also we have a program called Under 18 U. 18, which is our sports medicine and rehab program. It is the largest in the southeast, if you ask me. I mean, I think that it is it’s an absolutely a top program. It’s it’s ranked nationally by US News. And we do more surgeries than any other program in the state. We have our own sports medicine rehab program just for kids. And actually, that’s a that’s a perfect example of how it’s not apples to apples when you have adult services with kids services, because, for example, you know, when a child breaks a bone or has a severe orthopedic injury, how it’s managed because they’re still growing is very different than how you would treat it in an adult that’s already grown. So we tend to do things in a way where we’re going to try to avoid long term impact. That’s not positive. So maybe we do more bracing or we do more monitoring and then we do surgery as needed versus or sometimes surgery is the preferred route because you’re going to have better outcomes long run. But adult providers tend to do what’s good for adults. So if you if you bring a child to an adult or a pod, for example, or orthopedic surgeon, you’re going to get treated differently because it’s just a different approach, different training. So I think that it is absolutely true that that’s why that’s one of our biggest programs, because there are a lot of kids, are a ton of sports sports programs, sports competitions. So, yeah, I mean, that definitely is part of the reason why we’ve continued to grow.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:24] Now, are you seeing any trends or innovation coming up or on your radar now that maybe wasn’t there when you started?

Caitlin Stella: [00:20:35] Yeah, for sure. I mean, science obviously continues to move in terms of evolution and innovation. So we’re seeing a lot more things in children’s health care that are less invasive. So we have a growing cardiac catheter catheterization program that is actually a lot of new devices, a lot of procedures that can be done without doing open heart surgery, which is a great thing for kids. You know, definitely less invasive, definitely less downtime. So and that’s all a result of a lot of scientific innovation. So we’re seeing things like that even within neurosurgery or neurology, neurosciences, a lot of new treatments for things like epilepsy. So there’s also a trend now for more wearable technology for kids, which gives them a lot more freedom. So you can monitor their monitor them at home. Even within the hospital, we’ve tried to, wherever possible, have wearables that. Prevent them from being kind of tethered to their bed or so they have freedom to move and ambulate and walk around. So I think there’s a lot of cool innovation coming with children’s health care. We’re actually part of a national technology accelerator for children. It’s called Kidz X and it’s kind of like Space X, but kids X and we actually get to review and pilot a lot of different programs and services.

Caitlin Stella: [00:22:02] Some of them are things like apps, like we actually we’re fortunate to be part of a pilot study for an app that monitored a child’s tone of voice to see if they could predict depression. And it’s interesting because there was evidence within the research that was developed by the app developers and the company that that was there was a predictive model there. So it actually was very interesting to put that into use for something like predicting when a child was going to have a depressive episode and intervening before it happened. So we do a lot of cool things here, and I’m proud to say that even though we’re not part of a university, we are very much an academic institution. We have our own graduate medical education program with our own medical residents. We’re creating fellowships, we do research. So and I actually think sometimes we’re more nimble and more free because we don’t have that at university model. But it’s fun to watch, like the evolution of science and innovation come forward for the benefit of kids.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:07] So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Caitlin Stella: [00:23:11] Well, I will say that actually philanthropically, that’s probably the most important point to leave you with, because I think that there are children’s hospitals are a great resource for a community. But oftentimes, first of all, Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital, we take care of all children regardless of their ability to pay. So the only way we can really do that is similar to places like St Jude follows the same model. They are able to provide what they provide because they do a lot of fundraising. It’s the same exact thing. So we need that philanthropic support. I always tell people, if you’re going to give a dollar to St Jude, give ten to your local children’s hospital because kids are going to end up coming here for everything, not just cancer, which is what St Jude treats. But that’s just an example. I think that in general children’s hospitals are a really important structure in the community and when you have one and you have a good one, like an amazing one like mine, like Joe DiMaggio, it’s really important to continue to support it, even if it’s with time.

Caitlin Stella: [00:24:14] Some people volunteer. We have a school program called All Stars where the school adopts Joe DiMaggio as a charity of choice, and they do service projects for us, which means our projects with the kids, they come and donate things they do. They read stories. They they’ve done a lot of cool things with our kids over time. But whether you volunteer, whether you give in-kind, whether you give financially, I think it’s just really important to support hospitals like Children’s Hospital and take care of all kids in our community. And we also have a really great relationship with Boston Children’s Hospital. We’re affiliated with them and we are able to if a child has a very rare disease or a family needs to have a consult, a second opinion, whatever, we can facilitate that with our local partner. So again, it keeps kids close to home. It keeps their schedules regular, it gives kids exceptional care. And we’re only able to do those things with the support of the community. So that’s what I will leave you with for sure.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:15] And if somebody wanted to do that and support Joe DiMaggio, what’s the website and where should they be looking on the website to find ways to plug in, whether it’s to volunteer, whether it’s a donate, whether it’s a get involved in whatever manner is appropriate?

Caitlin Stella: [00:25:31] Yeah, We have a very simple website for that. It’s JD.com backslash. Give, give, give. So if you’re looking to give back either through a donation or you’re looking to give back through volunteerism or all of our programs like the ones I mentioned, like all sorts, like things like that, corporate giving, corporate matching, things like that. It’s all, all the information is available on that website. Jd.com Backslash, Give good stuff.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:59] Well, Kaitlin, congratulations on all the success and thank you so much for doing what you’re doing and sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Caitlin Stella: [00:26:07] Well, thank you. And thank you for letting us tell the story of this special gem that we have here. So I appreciate the timely.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:14] Thank you. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on South Florida Business Radio. Yeah.