When Stephanie Conners took over as CEO of BayCare Health System in late 2022, she faced a governance structure that had remained largely untouched since 1997. Within two years, that structure was replaced. Rather than working around legacy constraints, Conners led a full-scale overhaul.
A Career Built From the Bedside Up
Conners did not follow the typical finance or strategy path to the C-suite. She started as a bedside nurse, moved through patient services, and became chief nursing officer before taking on broader operational roles. Her experience includes senior leadership at Cooper University Health Care and Jefferson Health. That clinical background, built over thirty years, has influenced her approach to structural change. For Conners, governance is not an abstract exercise but a tool for making decisions faster for patients and the communities the system serves.
BayCare is a large, complex system: 16 hospitals, about a third of the region’s population served, 33,000 employees, and a US$10 billion economic footprint. Restructuring at this scale is not symbolic. It is a legal, financial, and political process that affects every part of the organization.
Dismantling a Three-Decade-Old Structure
In 2024, Conners led BayCare through a major corporate restructuring, moving the system from a joint operating agreement among three legacy partners to a single, unified not-for-profit entity. The shift from a three-owner model to community ownership was intended to keep local control over not-for-profit healthcare in the region.
Restructuring governance built by multiple founding institutions is rarely simple. It demands significant financial resources and alignment across boards, legacy partners, and community stakeholders. The process required negotiation and political coordination. Early results included faster, more streamlined decision-making under the new structure.
That speed was not theoretical. The consolidated governance structure enabled Conners' leadership team to move quickly. The impact was immediate. The new governance structure allowed BayCare to move quickly on a strategic partnership with Northwestern Medicine and the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, completing its transition to a full academic health system. Under the old model, a decision of this scale would have faced a slower, fragmented approval process. Restructured BayCare's executive leadership team, deliberately drawing the new leadership bench exclusively from internal talent across the system rather than looking outside for a fresh executive layer. That decision reflected a specific leadership philosophy: that an organization navigating major structural change is often better served by leaders who already understand its culture, communities, and operational realities than by external hires still learning the institution from scratch.
The combination of governance restructuring and leadership team redesign has positioned BayCare to keep growing amid real financial pressure across the broader healthcare sector. The system received The combination of governance restructuring and leadership changes has allowed BayCare to continue expanding during a period of financial pressure across the healthcare sector. The system secured approval for US$1.9 billion in tax-exempt bonds for construction and technology investment, and expanded hospital capacity despite operational disruptions from consecutive hurricanes in 2024. Expensive and politically sensitive, it is also tempting to defer indefinitely rather than confront it directly. Many health systems still operate under governance structures built for a different regulatory and competitive environment decades ago, and the temptation to manage around that structure rather than rebuild it is real, particularly given the short-term disruption involved.
Conners’ tenure shows what can change after disruption: faster decision-making, the ability to pursue complex partnerships without legacy barriers, and a leadership team accountable to the new structure. In a sector under financial and operational strain, structural agility is no longer optional. It is becoming a competitive necessity.
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