Meet Michael Garcia, Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital’s newest CEO

For me, it's important to get to know everyone because I want our staff at all levels to know I'm accessible. I am not just a person that traditionally is in a suit. I am outside of the administrative areas. I round in the emergency room; I round in the ICU; I round on the acute care floors. I talk to everyone, including every patient, but it is an incredibly difficult challenge because it is a large campus with a lot of people, and a lot of different buildings and departments to become familiar with.

What are you most proud of accomplishing since you’ve stepped into the CEO role?

I'm glad that I've gotten to know as many physicians, staff and a lot of details about the various programs, including the breast center, our cancer center, our heart programs, because it's important for me to know what drives people that work at Houston Methodist Sugar Land to keep them coming back and to know that they value the services we offer, and they value the work that they do because they know it makes a difference.

I'm looking forward to continuing that small achievement and then making it into all the other areas that are also important to learn more about and recognize.

What are some of the biggest challenges the hospital is facing?

The biggest challenges continue to be how best do we get our patients to the physicians that they want to see in a timely fashion. When I talk with our physicians, when I talk with our patients and our staff, the biggest challenge continues to be: “I can't get appointments as fast enough as I would like.” And it's not because anyone's doing a bad job, it’s because a lot of people are seeking health care, and for those that we know can't get in the next day or the day after the day after, there's a strategy for us to look at how many more physicians do we need to recruit? How do we reduce the number of days you spend waiting for a physician ... [and] all the other accompanying specialists?

We're also looking at how do we grow accordingly; how do we provide the appropriate number of hospital beds that our community needs, and then how to provide services also [that are] convenient for our community members.

What are your goals for improving the hospital?

I would say my goal is very simple, and there's perhaps two or three goals. The first one is to continue to provide the very best level of service that Sugar Land already has provided for a number of years in the community. ... There should not be any gap in any of the complex services that we provide because it's important for us to make sure that our community has confidence in the level of care.

Two, I want to continue to support our employees and build upon the success that we have, but knowing that we have to plan not only for the patients we care for [and] the services that we provide, but how do our employees and their needs grow, expand and change? So, I want to be cognizant of our employees.

[The] third thing that I want to build upon is [to] recognize that the community is growing exponentially larger and faster, and how [we can] continue to meet the services that the community demands of us and how to be one step ahead.

With recent cyber attacks on other hospitals, how is Houston Methodist protecting itself?

I'm incredibly proud to say that Houston Methodist has a very healthy respect for all the cyber attacks and what we've seen it can do. Electronic medical health records are incredibly important to us; we need to protect it at all costs because if we don't have it, we can't properly care for you without knowing your medical history.

We do everything we can to effectively protect our electronic databases. To that end, we employ a large amount of IT personnel that their sole responsibility is to safeguard our IT. Our IT department, if I recall correctly, also engages with outside companies to simulate attacks on us so we can be better prepared and better equipped to handle not only the fake ones, but all the real ones.

We also create multiple layers of security around us, that way any company that we do business with has to meet our standards for cybersecurity—that's one of the first hurdles any new company has to overcome in order to do business with us. If you want to do business with Houston Methodist, you have to meet our IT security requirements.

How have you seen the Greater Houston community health outlook change?

I think all of us are much more aware of the need to be healthier. We may not always practice it, but I think we are aware of the need to be healthier to prevent ourselves from being admitted into hospitals needlessly and not using the emergency rooms as our primary care or primary access to physicians.

I also think that, in the community, there's now a big push to have high-quality doctors in primary care, family practice and other specialties [to] be available in the community and not the traditional older model where you had to go to the hospital; today [it’s] doctors offices. [If] you go into communities now, you see professional buildings that have all the doctors offices and make it much more convenient for us as patients when we're seeing a doctor to get seen in a timely fashion in an environment that is not overwhelming or intimidating. Then also being able to know that should we need a hospital, it's readily available. ...

As a community, we're incredibly now aware of the need for mental health services to better care for the community, and not just the community but for those of us that also work in a health care setting. We want strong individuals that have balance with their mental health because we are also the people that care for the communities that we live and work in. ... A few years ago, I don’t think we were as focused on mental health; now we're focused on how [to] take a mental health day, and we’re trying to destigmatize that.

What can people expect to see from Houston Methodist Sugar Land in the coming years?

The best thing that Houston Methodist Sugar Land is going to provide for the community is not something that they're going to see directly. When they walk into Houston Methodist Sugar Land, they're going to see a wonderful campus filled with incredibly talented, caring and dedicated individuals. But as they go deeper and deeper into the level of care that they need, they're going to realize they do not have to leave Houston Methodist Sugar Land. We will provide all the care that they need at Sugar Land with the very best people—anywhere from cancer, to cardiology, to neuro, to breast care, to internal medicine and geriatrics. All of that is based upon the quality of people that we have, the quality of the people that support us, the quality of the people we engage with to provide that high level of quality care.