Lee Health president speaks about competition and Florida immigration laws affecting healthcare

When you walk through the doors of a hospital you’re there for a reason.

To say goodbye, to recover, maybe it’s to celebrate life. For Dr. Larry Antonucci, he’s at Lee Health to transform healthcare.

“We need to be the model for healthcare delivery. We’ve got all the pieces of the puzzle, but now what we need to do now is really work,” Antonucci said.

For most of Dr. Antonucci’s 40 years at Lee Health he delivered babies. In 2007, he took on the challenge of administration.

Ten years later, Lee Health named Antonucci president and CEO. While dealing with the business of healthcare, Antonucci told WINK he will never forget the people who need healthcare.

“If you always keep at the center what’s going to be best for the patients, what’s going to be best for their families, it makes the job easier,” Antonucci said. “Competition is one of the things that really attracted me to this health system, because what we can do as a health system is take ownership of the healthcare in the community. In a highly competitive environment, you’re focusing more on your interest and your competition than you are your patients.”

Antonucci told WINK he expects there to be more competition in the next five to 10 years.

“We’re going to have choice in the community, and our goal is to continue to be the provider of choice as we’ve been for over 100 years, and in order to do that, we have to focus on the patients and the family,” Antonucci said.

Though he’d been here for decades, the COVID pandemic made Antonucci a household name.

“One of the things I really focused on was to be a source of a truth for this community. What we learned is that we don’t know everything. That was difficult for health systems and for physicians to accept. Healthcare professionals were literally changing protocols, if not week to week, day by day,” Antonucci said. “I mean, we had our staff members who were sleeping in their garages, because they were afraid that they were going to give the disease to their families. It was so humbling.”

Antonucci kept up with the changes, both on the virus and the vaccine. Among his current challenges is Florida’s new immigration law. Lee Health must ask all patients if they’re “lawfully present in the United States.”

“It’s important for patients to know that if they need our care, we will be here for them. What their immigration status is will have no effect on how they’re treated,” Antonucci said.

For Antonucci, “Once a doctor, always a doctor.”