Pat Geraghty
2014 Floridian of the Year
Guided Well
In 2014, FLORIDA TREND described Geraghty’s company, Florida Blue, as “a staid company in a staid industry.” The 67-year-old health insurer had 11,500 workers and did about $8 billion in annual revenue.
Revenue has more than quadrupled since Geraghty became CEO in 2010, due in large part to its transition to Guidewell, a Jacksonville-based mutual insurance holding company with 18,000 employees and more than 150 primary care locations that it either owns outright or are part of a joint venture.
Florida Blue is now a subsidiary in what Geraghty calls a “health solutions company.” Its community investments focus on nutrition, mental health and well-being, especially in economically distressed communities. It partners with local nonprofits like Lift Orlando and Lift Jacksonville to help communities in need.
“We really have taken apart the traditional role of an insurance company,” he says.
As the state fought culture wars — the Legislature even passed a bill that prohibited private businesses from requiring training on diversity and inclusion that was overturned as unconstitutional last spring by a federal court — Guidewell has embraced the values as a key to its success. There aren’t quotas, but Geraghty wants his staff “at all levels” to reflect the diverse backgrounds of its customers. That means Hispanic, Black, LGBTQ+ people, seniors and veterans are in key positions. “Having those kinds of voices in the room has made us better,” he says. “That’s the philosophical orientation that we have here.”
Geraghty leads with a positive tone, and it seems to pay off. An independent survey found that 91% of employees consider Guidewell a great place to work.
He proudly cites strong satisfaction and loyalty scores from both Guidewell customers and employees. His peers see him as a leader, too, electing him to a second term as board chairman for AHIP, an insurance industry political advocacy organization. For Geraghty, it’s about access to policymakers in Washington.
Florida has 4.2 million people covered by the Affordable Care Act, more than a quarter of whom are Guidewell customers. The Act, known as Obamacare, is “finished law,” he says, and he plans to advocate for its continuation. “For most of those folks, it’s the first time in their life that they were covered for health insurance. It’s too important, it’s too meaningful to too many people to take it apart.”
In 2014, he believed Florida should expand Medicaid to cover more poor adults. It hasn’t happened, but Geraghty argues there’s a fiscal-conservative argument to do so, starting with Florida’s role as a donor state — sending tax dollars to Washington that end up benefiting other states because the Sunshine State doesn’t claim it back: “Those dollars would help our hospitals. They would help our system have less uncompensated care in the system. And they would put us in a position where we would actually be creating more jobs. We would have more economic prosperity because we did this.”
Guidewell is embracing artificial intelligence to improve care and increase efficiency. Because its customer base is so vast, it can rely solely on its own data without “opening that up to the broader world. We’re inside our own walls, which allows us to protect privacy and allows us to protect cybersecurity.”
At age 65, Geraghty says he hasn’t given any thought to a less demanding lifestyle. “When your energy is high and people around you are really great people to be taking on this challenge with, it creates a lot of fun,” he says. “Right now, I am as excited as I have ever been to come in and do the job that I have in front of me.”
Kiran Patel
2017 Floridian of the Year
Producing Doctors
Since being named Floridian of the Year seven years ago, philanthropist Kiran Patel has opened an A-rated charter high school serving 653 students in his hometown of Tampa, an Arated charter elementary and has gained approval to build a second high school in Pasco County.
He and his wife, Dr. Pallavi Patel, also founded the Orlando College of Osteopathic Medicine (OCOM), which opened to its first class of 97 students in August. The 144,000-sq.-ft., $75-million facility — located in Winter Garden — has clinical affiliation agreements with AdventHealth, Bay- Care, Halifax Health, Tampa General, UF Health and other hospital systems. It wants its students trained with diverse patient populations to better reach underserved communities.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Patel called it the beginning of “a journey of discovery and empowerment, and together we will make a difference and change the face of health care across the globe.” In a state facing a doctor shortage to meet a growing and aging population, the Dr. Kiran C. Patel Institute for Graduate Medical Education, a nonprofit created in partnership between Patel and OCOM, aims to create 1,000 new residency positions in the next decade.
It’s the second osteopathic medical college made possible by the Patels’ largesse. The Kiran C. Patel College of Osteopathic Medicine’s Clearwater campus, which opened in 2019, is part of Nova Southeastern University.
Patel, a cardiologist, was born in Zambia and met his wife while studying in India. They completed their medical educations at Columbia University in New York. Patel made his fortune in building WellCare, a physicianrun health plan that had more than $1 billion in revenue and 1,200 employees when he sold his interest in 2003 and turned his focus to philanthropy.
“There is more to success than creating wealth,” he said earlier this year. “I have learned how to use that success to advance professional, educational and philanthropic goals that create real changes in the world.”
Patel, who did not respond to interview requests, remains a businessman with an entrepreneurial eye. He is building a luxury condominium in Indian Rocks Beach and secured financing last summer to add a 20-story, mixed-use project just north of downtown Tampa.
Earlier this year, he announced a new venture, KARE Pharmtech, that seeks to help community pharmacies in underserved areas. “Seeing how so many local pharmacies are closing and turning rural areas into deserts without essential health care resources is simply untenable,” he said.
He also is a significant shareholder in Boston-based Medicare Advantage operator eternalHealth as it seeks to buy up plans in multiple states.
Brightline
2018 Floridian of the Year
On Track
If it can make it here, it can make it anywhere. Brightline, the privately financed rail service in the state, saw strong passenger growth in its first year of operating a three-hour Orlandoto- Miami line. That proves “it definitely works, and it is something that is a very investable product,” founder Wes Edens told CNBC last spring.
It has had operating profits in individual months, and officials are confident they can report a profit this quarter or next. The system is “getting to a point where we’re able to demonstrate that this business can support itself after really only one year of ramping up,” says Brightline President Patrick Goddard. And that has “absolutely catalyzed a conversation nationally around what good intercity passenger rail can look like.”
FLORIDA TREND named the rail company Floridian of the Year in 2018 when its South Florida routes opened. It took four years and $6 billion to extend Brightline’s tracks 170 miles from West Palm Beach to a station at Orlando International Airport. The 235-mile system also has stations in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Aventura. It hopes to add stops in Stuart and Cocoa, and later on, extend west to Tampa.
The first year of Orlando to Miami travel — at speeds up to 125 mph — generated 2.6 million rides covering 5.4 million miles. That, Brightline says, is equal to removing 1.9 million cars from the road.
Those numbers could climb to 500,000- 600,000 passengers per month, Goddard says, as Brightline’s market penetration grows. It is pursuing marketing partnerships with airlines, Orlando theme parks and cruise ship companies. And it plans to unveil a loyalty program for frequent riders within months.
The traveler’s experience is a priority, he says, covering everything from customer service, efficient baggage handling and the quality of food and beverage options. Brightline’s net promoter score (a market research metric measuring customer loyalty) is above 70, on par with luxury brands like Ritz Carlton and the Four Seasons. Goddard calls it “a product that is first class at a very affordable rate,” with one-way tickets between Orlando and South Florida starting at $29.
In a sign of optimism, Brightline’s fleet is growing, with five train cars per run after using only four the first year. That adds about 250 seats per trip. Those four-car trips were full about 30% of the time, and that reached 75% on many weekends, Brightline says. It received 20 new cars during the fall and plans to add 10 premium class cars in 2025.
As Brightline expands in Florida, work is underway on Brightline West, a 218-mile, all-electric high-speed rail service connecting Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga outside Los Angeles. The $12-billion project mostly is being built within Interstate 15’s median and is funded through private investors, a $3 billion federal grant and $3 billion in private activity bonds — U.S. Department of Transportation-backed tax-exempt debt instruments for public-private partnerships.
Brightline West will travel up to 200 mph, making the trip in two hours. Edens promises “the cleanest, greenest train in the world.” Brightline hopes to have it running in 2028. The company is already talking about adding routes in other “too long to drive, too short to fly” intercity markets such as Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, or Portland to Seattle.
It likely would not be happening if Edens and his fellow investors regretted the Florida experiment.
Yolanda Cash Jackson
2022 Floridian of the Year
Unexpected Pleasures
“I am now Professor Jackson,” Jackson says, with a mix of pride and fun. Fresh off teaching law students at her alma mater a compressed, one-week course on lobbying, Jackson drew energy from interacting with the next generation of lawyers.
She was able to show University of Florida law students how lobbying works — who hires lobbyists, how to work the committee process and how to diagnose a client’s needs in order to develop a strategy to address them. “Law school doesn’t teach you the process,” says Jackson, a shareholder in the Becker law firm’s Fort Lauderdale office.
She also brought in Mark Kaplan, UF’s vice president for government and community relations and a former chief of staff to Gov. Jeb Bush, to talk about lobbying as a career. Many of the students seemed intrigued. Regardless of what they end up practicing, Jackson has the same advice: “You have to show up the right way every time.”
The class was “an unexpected pleasure,” she says, one of many she is enjoying. The University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications inducted Jackson into its Hall of Fame in 2023.
But her greatest unexpected pleasure came last spring when she watched the first class of the John Lewis/HBCU Pathway to Law scholars program graduate from UF’s Levin College of Law. Meeting the graduates and their families at graduation was an “unexpected, rewarding experience.”
Jackson, who has lobbied for Florida’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) throughout her career, helped create the program, which provides privately funded scholarships to law students who earned their undergraduate degrees from an HBCU. Though there is no direct connection to Lewis, an iconic figure from the Civil Rights movement and a longtime U.S. representative, it was named in his honor after he died as the program was coming together in 2020, Jackson says.
“When you decide to do something like that, you don’t know the impact,” she says. To see 10 students “on their own merit thrive” and become young lawyers, especially following some of Florida’s culture wars, proved to be a moving experience.
Four new scholars have started law school.
Jackson, who grew up in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, calls herself a “politically correct disruptor.” Any grand plan for life, she says, came from a higher power.
“I’m doing just what God would have me do,” she says. “We are each given an assignment — some big assignments and some small assignments. To have the ability to hear what my assignment is, that I think that God has given me when he created this little girl from Liberty City. … I think that’s what gives me the most satisfaction.
“I’m just grateful that I had ears to hear it.”