Lisa Nummi’s pediatrician encouraged her to go into nursing. “So I went to nursing school and immediately fell in love. I was hooked,” she says. At Tampa General Hospital she kept ratcheting up the intensity, working in pediatrics, then pediatric intensive care, then the pediatric emergency room. Eventually she became a flight nurse paramedic, treating injured patients in a helicopter whirring through the sky.

“It was really a great experience, but I always wanted to know more and do more. I just kept going back to school to learn new things,” Nummi says. She started thinking it would be helpful for people leading hospitals to have a clinical background to help them really understand hospitals and patients and physicians.

“I spent probably 12 to 15 years of my life on the night shift, and I knew that hospitals were different on nights and weekends than they were during the day,” she says. Fewer staffers, fewer resources. “It’s really important to know that when you run a hospital, right?”

At Bayfront Health St. Petersburg, a 480-bed hospital, she was director of emergency services, then an administrator, and finally COO. She would go on to be COO at hospitals in Bradenton and Las Vegas. Today she’s the CEO of HCA Florida Citrus, a 204-bed rural hospital in Citrus County in west central Florida. “The beauty of working in a community hospital is that we’re caring for our neighbors and our friends and the people who work in our community,” she says.