Fifteen years of AdventHealth Waterman capital projects, reframed as one story: the deliberate construction of a sanctuary for whole-person care — built by the room asked to keep funding it.
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Watch the finished film · 2:17
For its 15th Annual A Night in the Winners' Circle Gala, the AdventHealth Waterman Foundation didn't need another highlight reel of new equipment and expanded square footage. They needed a reason for a room of donors, physicians, and patients to see fifteen years of capital projects as one continuous act — and to keep it going.
The brief: The Concept: Building the Sanctuary. Frame the ER expansion, the Heart Center, robotic surgery, and the Wellness Trail not as a list of purchases, but as the intentional construction of a sanctuary for Whole Person Care.
The gala date wasn't moving. From first concept conversation to final delivery, the film was written, shot, and finished in under 60 days.
Hospitals expand in phases, and capital campaigns usually follow the same fragmented shape — fund this wing, fund that machine. We proposed treating AdventHealth Waterman's last fifteen years as construction of a single building instead, with each major investment standing in for one part of its architecture. Equipment becomes structure. Structure becomes a place. And a place needs someone to live in it — which is where the physician, the patient, and the donor all move from footnote to protagonist.
In 1992, the ER had seven beds and patients were wheeled straight through a crowded waiting room. The 2019 expansion — funded by the community — turned it into a department built to see nearly 70,000 patients a year. Everything else in the film stands on this ground.
For years, serious cardiac and rehabilitative care meant a long drive out of Lake County at the most vulnerable possible moment. The Heart Center and Inpatient Rehabilitation closed that gap — walls that let more than 3,000 hearts a year beat stronger without patients ever leaving home.
Precision is what turns an eight-week recovery into a two-week return to life. The film frames the da Vinci robot and the TULSA procedure not as hardware, but as dignity — the difference between losing months to recovery and getting a life back without the scars.
Thirty years were spent building a sanctuary to heal the body. The Wellness Trail is the first piece built to do something new: extend that healing past the property line, into daily life, before anyone becomes a patient at all.
A foundation, walls, and precision instruments are still just a structure without someone inside them. The film closes by handing the sanctuary back to the people who make it one: "You built a sanctuary," it tells them. "Now we need you to be its soul."
Everyone on screen was filmed in their own working environment, on the AdventHealth Waterman campus. No studio. No green screen. Every frame was shot in the actual working spaces.
The film premiered live to the room it was made for, ahead of remarks from Dr. Kami Strong — the physician featured on camera walking guests through the sanctuary she helped build. Then came the paddle raise: the night's live fundraising ask, run in the minutes right after the screening, closed at $30,350 — the most direct read available on how the room responded to seeing itself in the story. The full response arrived the next morning.
The video was so nice. I think we all did a great job. Please thank the team for creating such a wonderful segment. They helped me make it look so easy. And my son loved seeing his mom on a “commercial.” Kudos for bringing $225,000. The night was truly a success.Dr. Kami Strong, MDAdventHealth Waterman — featured physician
Please see Dr. Strong's remarks about the video — this is you and your team! Great job. Thank you for everything.Joan OrdazzoResource Development Manager | Foundation, AdventHealth Waterman
Thanks for creating such a solid media piece for us. I look forward to continuing a strong partnership with you.Mabel ValdiviaExecutive Director | Foundation, AdventHealth Waterman