Federal actuaries project national health spending will pass 20% of gross domestic product by 2033. Tampa General Hospital’s answer to that math is to put its own nurses in front of a panel of judges and write the winners a check.
That approach landed the hospital at No. 20 on Fast Company’s eighth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list, released this month. Tampa General is the top Florida entry and the highest-ranked hospital in the top 100.
“At Tampa General, we believe that if we want to fundamentally transform healthcare, we have to be willing to challenge the status quo — and that starts by creating a culture where our team members feel empowered to ask questions, think differently and act on their ideas to drive change,” said John Couris, President and CEO of Tampa General Hospital.
Tampa General has hosted TGH Innovation Week each year since 2024 in partnership with USF Health. This year’s edition in February ran across the Tampa Medical and Research District, with workshops, technology demonstrations, and a ribbon-cutting at the hospital’s new 32,000-square-foot Innovation Center in Ybor City.
The main event is a Shark Tank-style pitch competition. Teams from across the system bring ideas for improving patient care and hospital operations to a panel that includes Couris, board members, and outside experts. More than 50 ideas were submitted this year.
Five infusion nurses won. They had noticed that patients who needed treatments of 30 minutes or less were waiting two to four hours because they shared space and staff with patients on hours-long infusions. Their fix was a dedicated Fast Track area for short infusions, staffed by two nurses and a technician. After testing the concept, the average wait fell to about 14 minutes. Tampa General committed $50,000 to implement it.
The other half of Tampa General’s case is AI. In a Fast Company feature published Sept. 15, Couris said the hospital’s AI tools “are designed to create value for the consumers and supercharge clinicians’ ability to do more complex and meaningful work.”
Sepsis, an immune response to infection, is one of the leading causes of death in U.S. hospitals. Tampa General’s analytics team built a Sepsis Hub on Palantir’s AI platform. The early warning system reads vital signs, lab values, and the medical record for the subtle changes that show up before a patient crashes, and flags the case for clinicians.
Faster detection cut sepsis mortality in half, from 10.5% to 5.3%. As Couris put it in July: “Almost 1,000 people are home with their families today that otherwise would have been dead.”
The same push put agentic AI assistants in the hospital’s call centers. They have answered more than 2 million calls since September 2025, and the hospital says appointment capacity is up 21% and call wait times are down 58%.
Tampa General finished one spot behind e.l.f. Beauty and three behind Land O’Lakes. Mascara and butter are apparently harder to reinvent than sepsis care.
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Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.