15 MINUTES
More than just a number cruncher
BY EVAN WILLIAMS Florida Weekly Correspondent

PHOTO EVAN WILLIAMS Neal Sword, corporate director of business operations at Lee Memorial Health System, in his office. He's a busy man but still has time to be an avid art collector and military history buff.

Neal Sword, corporate director of business operations at Lee Memorial Health System, spends his days surrounded by numbers he is responsible for, like these:

8,000: the number of employees at Lee Memorial Health System.

$570,000,000: the amount of money he has to put in the LMHS bank account this year.

$153,636,376: the amount owed to LMHS by insurance companies, state and federal governments, and patients.

$22,086,907: the bill, to the day, current hospital patients have collectively accumulated to date, but not yet been billed for.

"We've got numbers all over the place," he said. "We've got numbers everywhere. I monitor all these numbers to make sure functions are going well."

All of these statistics come across his neatly kept, Formica-topped desk each day. Family photographs are collected on the cabinets above his computer (three daughters, a grandchild, and his wife).

"I'm basically a hospital bill collector," Sword said. "But this is not a business I'm running. I'm a business trapped inside a hospital."

Sword explains that the measure of success for a business - a health insurance company, for example - is profit, getting as much of it as possible. The measure of success for Sword, who manages the business end of the non-profit LMHS, the "profit," he said, is quality health care for citizens of Lee County, getting as much of it as possible.

"Every penny I get goes back into LMHS," he said. "We can't ever forget, we're not running

a business to make money, even though that's what I do all day long, that's not the mission of the hospital."

Sword is 60 years old, bright and affable, and seems to harbor an enormous thirst for Impressionist paintings, something one might suspect after seeing a few of them hanging around the reception room, then more lining the hallways leading to his office.

Beyond the hallways are rooms filled with cubicles, more than 100 of them, Sword said, mostly to deal with collecting money from insurance companies and the state and federal programs Medicare and Medicaid.

Then his office: a full-blown Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet mini-museum, with a small shelf of books on the subject. Sword says he also reads a lot of U.S. military history and is "quasi-fanatic about the Civil War."

"Why not?" he said, gesturing towards one of the paintings in the hall. "Van Gogh was crazy, but looking at his pictures calms me down. Something about his art makes me feel better."

Sword said he wants to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Seeing an original Van Gogh, in person, once filled him with awe, he said.

"If you get up real close to it, it doesn't make sense," he said. "You have to step back."

Sword grew up in Baltimore, on the Chesapeake Bay, fishing with his father, and graduated from the University of Baltimore. When he moved to Florida with his wife in 1976, he had "no job, no money and no insurance," he said, and that is when he came to work for Lee Memorial.

"My wife got sick, and was admitted to Lee Memorial for surgery. I had no way to pay. Lee wanted a $500 deposit, which I borrowed from my life insurance policy. That still left a balance of $1,100. I told the business office here I'd be getting a job soon to pay it off, and it ended up as a job interview. They hired me as an assistant. I signed a contract to pay $40 per month, but ended up going to the Vice President and asking him to write it off. The VP made me pay every penny, he said 'so you'll have some understanding of the people you have to deal with.'"

He has stayed for 31 years.

"I've dedicated my career and most of my adult life to LMHS," he said. "I'd rather go to the beach and drink beer under a palm tree for a living, but if I have to be somewhere, this is a pretty good place to be."

To stay "sane," Sword said he visits a friend in Missoula, Mont. twice a year for about 10 days.

"I like out West," he said. "I love Florida, but you've gotta go where there's different geography once in a while, where it's not all flat and palm trees everywhere.

"And it's cheaper than a psychiatrist," he quips. ¦