For Dr. Jennifer Bocker, who became the new Chief Medical Officer at HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital this past January, the sky, quite literally, is her only limit. After nine years working as a head and neck trauma surgeon, surgical oncologist, Executive Board member, and Chair of Strategic Planning at the Surgical Specialists of Colorado, Dr. Bocker ventured south to HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital to affect change on a larger level than she could as a practicing physician. “While I was working my way through this practice and learning how to run it, we would have meetings with large hospital systems—I would find myself going home just to research for hours what we had talked about. That led me to get my MBA—I fell in love with the business side of medicine and realized that I had hit the ceiling of what I could do and how I could affect change on a larger scale,” says Dr. Bocker.
DR. JENNIFER BOCKER, CMO OF SARASOTA DOCTORS HOSPITAL, IS A TEAM LEADER ON THE GROUND AND IN THE AIR.
Instead of just changing the lives of individuals, Dr. Bocker will now have the chance to impact the lives of an entire roster of patients as well as the medical staff of HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital. “I’ll be working in a few different areas. I’ll be helping to advance on the quality side—making sure that new initiatives are being implemented and ensuring that our patients are receiving the highest quality of care. I’ll also serve as a liaison between the medical staff—our doctors and providers —and administration,” adds Dr. Bocker Her passion for helping others, however, wasn’t the only thing that she brought with her from Colorado—her love of skydiving came along for the ride as well. After her first foray into the extreme sport in 2006, Dr. Bocker was hooked. “It was the first place I had gone to where I didn’t think of anything else. I didn’t think about stress, work or my patients. The only thing I could think about was skydiving.”
Since then, Dr. Bocker has performed thousands of jumps and already owns one skydiving world record in the large formation sit position. “When you get a world record, there’s an energy that goes through the formation. Even though you can’t see the entire formation, you know that you’ve got it. It’s just an incredible feeling, like nothing I’ve ever felt before,” says Bocker.
This November, Dr. Bocker will be a part of Project 19—an initiative funded by the Women’s Skydiving Network to break the women’s large formation, head-down position world record jump to celebrate 101st anniversary of the 19th Amendment. With 102 skydivers creating the formation mid-air, Dr. Bocker is set to be a part of the eight-person foundation from which all other skydivers build off of.
“Each plane carries about 23 people, so there will be four or five planes going into the air. It has to be engineered just right so that the planes are in the correct formation at the correct time. Everybody has a different cue for when they should be exiting the plane to build the formation. At the end of it you only have a few seconds to get everybody there. It’s quite the engineering feat,” says Dr. Bocker. Whether her feet are on the ground or her head is in the clouds, Dr. Bocker relishes the chance to work with others to achieve the impossible. “Everything’s a team effort and without the team, you won’t be successful. Everybody on the team is trying to do their best to achieve this one goal—in skydiving it’s the record, in healthcare the goal is to keep getting better for our patients,” says Dr. Bocker.
