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Carol Gomes TOM GOGOLA
When Carol Gomes started working at Stony Brook University Hospital nearly four decades ago as a medical lab technologist, her career goal at that time was to be a laboratory administrator.
It didn’t quite work out that way for Gomes — who is now the hospital’s chief operating officer and chief executive officer of the hospital system, overseeing a staff of close to 7,500 across three Stony Brook University Hospital facilities, including Stony Brook Southampton Hospital and Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport.
Gomes earned a health care policy management master’s degree at Stony Brook University and recalls that she was looking for hospital jobs outside of Stony Brook, given that “there’s only one lab administrator in a hospital.”
An administrator heard that she was looking to move on and approached Gomes with an offer.
“He said, ‘You have certain skills sets,’” which include data analysis and consensus building, and told Gomes that he had a position in mind that would keep her at Stony Brook as an administrator of quality management at the hospital.
She was skeptical at first — “I had spent my whole life and effort to lab medicine,” she said — but ended up taking the position.
“That just opening up so many avenues working here,” Gomes recollected during a recent interview at her office, located in one of the two iconic dice-like concrete cubes that comprise the bulk of the Stony Brook facility on Nichols Road.
From there, she would go on to earn another master’s degree, in health care management, from Stony Brook University. “I’m just Stony Brook through and through,” said a beaming Gomes. “There is red Stony Brook blood flowing through my veins.”
She would eventually be tapped as chief operations officer in 2011, before her promotion to CEO. “They wanted to test-drive me as director of operations for a little while,” said Gomes, who was then promoted to CEO “right before the pandemic hit.”
“I was given the CEO position two weeks before the first COVID cases we had,” she recalled. “That’s a career and personal life-changer. I was completely consumed for years.”
Gomes said the most surprising part of the CEO job was that she had not previously “realized the power of the team,” as she marveled at how “every single person in this organization, it doesn’t matter what kind of a job they have, is providing some kind of a factor toward contributing to patients’ care. Even if they never see a patient.”
That extends to the housekeepers who keep rooms clean “and free of infection,” to top administrators like herself who advocate for those patients — and for the hospital itself — before Washington, D.C., and Albany lawmakers.
It’s one thing to read the hospital’s mission statement on a piece of paper, said Gomes, and another to see it in action. “It’s fascinating and amazing, and I don’t think I recognized the importance of that — ‘clinical care, excellence in research and education’ is one thing on paper. But as lived, it’s totally different.”
Gomes said she thrives in an environment where so many young people are around at the beginning of their careers in medicine. “They’re enthusiastic, they’re all-in, they’re sponges who absorb information,” she said.
Her role as CEO helps to bridge some of the macro issues facing health care providers — decreased reimbursements even as costs increase — and strategize on how to not just survive but thrive in an global health care industry where that’s an increasingly tough nut to crack, she said. Here, the educational mission of the hospital provides a direct conduit from the challenges and changes in health care practices and delivery, to changes at the curriculum level at the school.
“We have to think about how we are educating, and you can shape that through the curriculum,” Gomes said, “and change the whole way we deliver education so it’s relevant to when students are in the real world. To train them in the same way as the last 15 years won’t cut it — it just won’t.”
Her priorities, Gomes said, are to “focus on the new direction that health care is going, which is to identify alternative forms of care outside of the four walls of the hospital.” The key service lines the hospital is focused on are cardiovascular, neuroscience, pediatrics, women’s health, digestive health, orthopedics and cancer.
There is a new area on the hospital campus that’s focused only on cancer and “what will it look like five years out?” Gomes speaks of a brave new world of cancer care using AI technology “to come up with predictive models and modes of treatment that would be the most effective for the majority of the population.”
Another priority: How to “shift care from the hospital to the home.” The advent of telehealth practices was in its infancy at the outset of the COVID epidemic, she noted, “and now it’s almost the norm after a few short years.”
Gomes grew up in the nearby hamlet of Centereach, and her parents, who are in their 80s, still live there. She remembers the old roller rink on Middle Country Road and especially the late and lamented Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant across the street from the roller rink, where she held her wedding shower. She now lives in Mt. Sinai.
When it comes to the advent of telehealth, she said, “I think about my parents and the difficulty they have driving, getting in and out of the car.” Of course, there are challenges with getting telehealth systems set up for seniors and others, she said with a slight chuckle.
Gomes has three children in their early 20s at various stages of college or starting their careers. One’s at Fordham, another graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology and is studying recreational therapy, and the third just got a job at The New York Times, journalism degree in hand.
One of Gomes’s big tasks as lead administrator is to lobby for workforce grants and for disproportionate share hospital payments. Stony Brook is a safety net public hospital, meaning that while it “takes all comers, not all comers can pay.”
“It’s imperative to ensure that we are reimbursed at an adequate rate. It’s a big deal,” she said.
And she’s focusing attention to housing and staff retention, especially on the South Fork. “It is so difficult to recruit at Southampton” and the Greenport facility, she said.
A new Stony Brook satellite in East Hampton is under development, and she’s aware that students and health care providers alike all need housing if they’re going to be drawn to, let alone stick around at, these facilities.
“It’s very hard to afford housing, especially if you’re coming from another part of the country — there’s real sticker shock. You want to be able to provide workforce housing and housing for students as well,” she said.
She’s hopeful that there will be greater incentives for medical students doing a clinical rotation at one of the East End hospitals to end up working there. “The goal would be, ‘By the way, when you graduate, we’d love to have you here.’”
The lab results are in when it comes to Gomes’s effectiveness as an administrator, and they speak to the health of the institution placed in her care.
Under her leadership, the hospital expanded its operating rooms and radiology suite while working to further integrate the East End facilities into the Stony Brook Medicine hospital system. Gomes was an administrator when the hospital completed an expansion project in 2019 that saw the opening of its Medical and Research Translation (MART) building, the Stony Brook University Cancer Center, and the 150-bed Hospital Pavilion, which includes the new Stony Brook Children’s Hospital.
Those efforts paid off in 2021, when Stony Brook University Hospital was recognized by Healthgrades as one of America’s 100 best hospitals.
“Health institutions are struggling nationally, but we’re doing pretty well — we’re doing well,” said Gomes, and she chalks that up to the “extraordinarily talented people here — I believe that in my heart and I see it every day here.”
OK, last question: What is Gomes’s favorite medical TV show?
“House,” she said without a beat, as the cheerful CEO leads a tour of the hospital’s new cardiac wing, its cancer center, and the children’s hospital that features a multipanel live video feed from the Long Island Aquarium in Riverhead in the colorful lobby.
“It’s ‘House’ — but only because I like to poke holes in it,” Gomes said with a burst of laughter, heels clacking in a sunlit hospital corridor as she heads off to another meeting.
