Emerging Cooperation

Hospital project comes as a nod to Tallahassee

It is not often that I pass by the surgery center at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare that bears his name without thinking about the legacy of M.T. Mustian and my encounters with him.

For 25 years, Mustian served TMH as its administrator, exhibiting throughout that quarter-century a restrained and respectful leadership style. He was never loud, never flamboyant, never given to self-promotion or burnishing his own credentials. He was always willing to listen, actively and sincerely, and knew to get out of the way of doctors and other medical professionals, trusting them to do their jobs conscientiously and well.

And, he was firm when he needed to be.

I got to know “Mr. Mustian,” as most everyone called him, when he served as chairman of a customer advisory board for a regional community bank that had branch offices in Tallahassee. I was the bank’s marketing guy and its representative to that board. Even at that level, M.T. was consistently well-prepared, gracious and accommodating. He hosted customer appreciation events at his home on Velda Dairy Road.

Given Mustian’s chairmanship of the advisory board, membership thereon was a far more prestigious station than it otherwise would have been. M.T. stayed close to the community.

One morning, seated on his porch overlooking his expansive garden, he and I sipped iced tea. He was the son of an itinerant Texas farmer and could grow more than hospitals. I asked M.T., who would live to be 96, what the key to his longevity was.

“Ninety percent genetics,” he said, modest to a fault.

M.T. would be proud to see the progress that TMH has made in the years since he retired. And he would be especially delighted by TMH’s inclusion as a partner, along with the FSU College of Medicine and The St. Joe Company, in the development of a medical office building and full-service teaching hospital in Panama City Beach.

M.T. had ties to Bay County, having served as CEO at Bay Medical Center (BMC) in Panama City for four years before making his way to Gainesville and then to Tallahassee in 1964. BMC is today known as Ascension Sacred Heart Bay, a phrase that speaks to consolidation in the health care industry as well as any could. M.T. would later return to Bay County as a consultant to BMC’s board of directors at a point when the hospital was seeking support for a local-option sales tax to fund future building projects.

That tax was approved by voters and later undone. Hoped-for projects never happened.

Now, an impressive medical campus is under construction in western Bay County, a rapidly growing area that has been without a hospital to this point. Four years of planning preceded the groundbreaking for the campus held earlier this year. St. Joe deliberated carefully before settling on TMH as its preferred health care provider for the project.

A key determinant of TMH’s selection was its willingness to allow for local governance of the new hospital, something that was of utmost importance to Jorge Gonzalez, St. Joe’s president and CEO. Other health care giants, headquartered in Nashville and St. Louis, were unwilling to accept a local board.

So it was that the consideration came down to something that M.T. encouraged and that current TMH president and CEO Mark O’Bryant values — close community ties.

And so it is that TMH’s selection comes not just as a nod to Mr. Mustian or Mr. O’Bryant. It comes, too, as an appreciation for TMH as a true regional player in health care, for all who support the hospital, for the visionaries who brought about the FSU College of Medicine and for all who have contributed to making FSU a leading university nationwide.

It comes as a nod to Tallahassee from a region that historically has demonstrated a reluctance to align itself with the Capital City. Of this new and emerging cooperation, good things will come.

Be well,

Steve Bornhoft, Executive Editor
sbornhoft@rowlandpublishing.com