A group of Nemours donors, executive team members and health care partners welcomed new Nemours President and CEO Dr. Larry Moss and his wife Kris to the community at a private reception in Ponte Vedra on Thursday, March 28.
Moss, a Jacksonville Beach resident, is a renowned pediatric surgeon, biomedical researcher, educator and health care system executive. He began his tenure at Nemours Children’s Health System Oct. 1, 2018, succeeding Dr. David Bailey.
“It’s been great,” said Moss at the reception, which was hosted by Terry and Sharon Fowler at their home in Marsh Landing. “I love Jacksonville. I love the people. I love the community. Being part of Nemours is just something really special.”
Moss joined Nemours after serving seven years as surgeon-in-chief at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and the E. Thomas Boles Jr. Professor of Surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Previously, Moss served as the inaugural chief of surgery at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital and Robert Pritzker Professor of Surgery at Yale University School of Medicine. He also served in leadership roles at Stanford University School of Medicine. He attended college at Stanford, medical school at the University of California, San Diego, and completed General Surgery Residency at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle. He then moved to Chicago and completed Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)/Critical Care and Pediatric Surgery fellowships at Northwestern University.
At Nemours, Moss believes the organization is uniquely positioned to profoundly influence the way America delivers care to children.
“What we’d like to see is a system that instead of getting paid for volume and complexity of treatment, we get paid for health,” Moss said. “We’d like to flip that model and show the country that if we invest in the health of kids, we’re going to transform society.”
The Fowlers, who previously owned Havoline Xpress Lube, are one of many families who have been personally impacted by the work of Nemours. Their three grandsons spent considerable time there as a result of an extremely rare genetic form of bone marrow failure called Dyskeratosis. Michael, the middle child, died at the age of 19, and Hunter died at 15. Matthew, said the Fowlers, continues to hang on at age 27. Throughout these struggles, the Fowlers said Nemours has been “awesome helping the boys.”
“Nemours is an amazing organization,” Terry Fowler said, “and it’s just a pleasure to give back to those they help.”
