Stephanie D. Conners, 51, is President and CEO of BayCare Health System, West Central Florida’s leading health care provider. An experienced health care leader, she has built a reputation as an inspiring leader and collaborator committed to health care delivery with the highest standards of clinical excellence, compassion, safety, service, and engagement. That unique combination derives from a career that began at the bedside as a nurse (she still maintains her nursing license) and then moved into patient services before becoming a Chief Nursing Officer. She later added operations to her portfolio and led several high-quality health care systems as the Chief Operating Officer for both not-for-profit and for-profit entities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before joining the not-for-profit BayCare system in November 2022. Conners holds a bachelor’s degree from Villanova University and an MBA from Eastern University. She and her husband, Timothy Conners, have four children and one grandchild.

During her first year as president and CEO, Conners prioritized improving the healthcare workers’ experience in the post-COVID-19 world. Personally, she embarked on a series of dozens of town halls and more candid listen-and-learn sessions to be felt and heard directly by thousands of physicians and team members. Formally, she backed new investments to improve the frontline experience, including implementing a pilot “Stress First Aid” program with the American Nurses Association Enterprise; launching a nationally-award-winning Virtual Nurse program that allows bedside nurses to spend more time with patients and less time with paperwork; and announced a partnership to develop artificial intelligence to help relieve the cognitive load of those on the front lines. “Team members are our most important asset, and therefore, my first priority,” Conners says.