Connect Live @ Adventist Health | August 26, 2021
Story 36

How do we talk to and with each other? How do we maybe do less telling? Because communication isn't just about sharing information. It's a two-way street. How do we ask more questions?

Joyce:

Welcome to Connect Live at Adventist Health. I'm your host, Joyce Newmyer, the Chief Culture Officer of Adventist Health. Today, we're going to be talking about our Mission Summit in 2022. We're going to be talking about Adventist Health's well-being work in Miami, and then last, we'll talk about tattoos and new starts. But first, let me say that we are looking forward to the Mission Summit like we look forward to few other meetings in our company because it's not just a meeting. It's an experience. Our Chief Mission Officer, Alex Bryan, has announced that our Mission Summit will be January 27 and 28 of next year. Our focus will be home, the kind of home where you feel belonging and where you are valued and where you feel loved. And we'll be hosting this at our home office in Roseville, and we'll also be streaming it globally for everyone who's not able to be there in person. So we look forward to this happening again in January of 2022.

Joyce:

So today, I'd like to invite Bill Wing, the President of Adventist Health, and Ben Leedle, the President of the Well-Being Division of Adventist Health, anchored by the Blue Zones, world-famous Blue Zones. We're privileged to have both of you here with us today, so welcome.

Joyce:

Let me ask my first question of you Ben. We have a project that we've announced that we're going to be involved in in Miami, clear on the other side of the country from where our home office is. How did we become involved in this? What are we calling it? What are you most excited about? Tell us more about this.

Ben:

Sure, and thanks so much. It's great to be here. I'm happy to have a chance to share this really exciting development. Our new agreement in Miami is a joint venture called Blue Legacy Ventures and we're doing that in partnership with Royal Palm companies. You'll hear a lot more as we go forward about RPC. That is the Royal Palm companies. And we got involved in this through our partner, Brian Paradis and team at C-Suite Solutions, who is doing some work on behalf of RPC and recognized an incredible alignment between RPC's vision on their real estate project and Adventist Health's 2030 strategy. So that was the beginning of what has turned into a really deep partnership.

Ben:

RPC, just to give you a little background, has a 40-year track record of success innovating in urban mixed-use real estate. The joint venture between Adventist Health and RPC will be responsible for managing 120,000-square-foot space on the campus of RPC's planned 55-story tower in downtown Miami. It's going to have over 300 residences, a hotel and convention center with over 200 rooms, along with select retailers and restaurants all on the theme of well-being, driven with the tenants of Blue Zones.

Ben:

Our space that we'll have there is referred to as the podium. It's a 10-story building, integrated well-being and medical center, that sits right beside and connected to the 55-story tower. Just a real quick snippet about our direct and focused work will be led initially by our Well-Being Division team, and we'll be operating the Blue Zone Center, which includes a spa, a fitness center, well-being immersion experiences and services, and an advanced lifestyle medicine clinic. And Blue Zones will be responsible for integrating the Power Nine and the Life Radius models that you've all become much more familiar with throughout the entire mixed tower campus, from the residents of the hotel, to the retailers, to the restaurants, and then expanding to the surrounding area in downtown Miami that's referred to as One World Center.

Ben:

And then via community development, in concert with the mayor and the private sector, eventually to an entire Miami-Dade region as a Blue Zone project. So we see this blue beacon in this campus expanding broadly in this region and we'll pull on every facet of our entire current capabilities of the Well-Being Division, which Blue Zones, Synchronous, Starling, and our Well-Being Institute, all already integrated in this work, and we'll need more in order to advance the work.

Ben:

To answer your question, what am I most excited about? I think it's this development will require us to continue to advance our capabilities to help drive healthy behaviors and healthy habits, and doing that specifically through design of the places where we spend our time and through consumer experiences. Both of those, I think, are fundamental competencies in order to reach our overall enterprise 2030 strategy. And it will demand more from us than just our Well-Being Division and the partners we have. It'll truly require, I think, the first deep integration of Care, Health and Well-Being divisions at Adventist Health in a single instance. And in many ways, this agreement will begin to give us an early glimpse at a part of the future company that we can become through execution and part of our long-term strategy here.

Ben:

And I just would remind everybody that's sitting there saying, "Holy cow, how are we going to do all this?" Thirty-four to 38 months until the ribbon's cut and the door's open on this, so there is some runway. It'll go quick, but it's going to coincide with us as a whole enterprise being a third of our way to our journey, Joyce, so very excited to share this news.

Joyce:

Great. Thank you, Ben. That's great information for all of us. Bill, thanks for being with us, as well. Can you tell us more about this investment and why it's important to Adventist Health?

Bill:

Yeah, thank you, Joyce and Ben, for sharing a little bit about the Miami project. When you think about Adventist Health and our 2030 strategy, we're really trying to advance along three fronts: care, health and well-being. And over the next decade, we're going to make investments in all three aspects of our strategy. When we think about care today, we think about our current footprint of 75-plus communities across three states. But as we begin to think about health and well-being, our horizons begin to expand, and today, with the acquisition of Blue Zones and the Well-Being Division, they're already touching 20-plus communities across the U.S. and globally, representing 4 million individuals being impacted.

Bill:

And so part of our strategy for 2030 was the ability to expand both nationally and globally. So thinking about Miami is not a big stretch as we think about that. I know there's always concerns about investment, how much investment, and we are deeply committed to care. And over the next decade, we're going to double our care footprint and we're going to invest the majority of our dollars in that regard. With that being said, as we think about moving nationally or even globally, you're going to start to hear us talk about an asset-light strategy where we may not go in and own all the bricks and mortar of a hospital, or even have a large clinic network, but begin to partner that differently, but yet still the well-being and the Blue Zones brand as part of that experience.

Bill:

So as Ben mentioned, this is an integrated partnership between medical, lifestyle, fitness spa, into a planned development. With that being said, we have joint-ventured this relationship, so we're 50 percent partner. Our total investment in cash for this is $16 million. And to put that in perspective, if we invested in one inpatient bed in California, it's $4 million per bed, so this is truly, in my opinion, an asset-light strategy. It's like investing in our 300-plus clinic. What's different though is that we do have partners. And so as we think about the medical component, that will be brought by another partner. When we think about fitness and spa, that's going to be brought by another partner. And so in many ways we have kind of de-risked this relationship as it relates to investments.

Bill:

And I know another piece of this is, "Well, where is that investment coming from, that $16 million?" Well, that's going to come from investment income. That's not going to come from the EBIDA or the margin that is being generated by any of our markets or hospitals today. And the last aspect of this is that $16 million investment is going to be over five to six years. And we don't make our first kind of cash disbursement until year three and then it ramps up. So this is not taking away current capital capacity in any way and begins to play out this asset-light strategy that we're going to deploy both nationally and globally.

Bill:

So I'm real excited about this opportunity. It's the first time that we get to bring together in a planned environment kind of care, and health, and well-being in a partnered way. And, frankly, it creates an almost international kind of opportunity as we think about this is all set up to convention centers, an international business convention center that's part of this development and stuff. Just truly excited about extending not only Adventist Health, but extending Blue Zones for the Well-Being Division to more individuals across our country.

Joyce:

Thanks for sharing that. That's very helpful to understand a lot of the business behind this. We have promised you a very short broadcast every week, so we're going to talk about the tattoos next week instead of trying to cram it in right now. So thank you Bill and Ben for joining us today. Come back next week Thursday at noon, Pacific time. We'll be with Alex Bryan and our own Gabrielle Nichols-Roy, who's part of the production of this program. Friends, thanks for connecting live and we will see you next week. Until then, let's be a force for good.