Hospital Partners with Christian Publishers

by Marcia Ford, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 8/23/2006

When the president of the faith-based Florida Hospital challenged the staff to discover creative ways to influence the world beyond its doors, administrators decided to approach CBA publishers with the idea of partnering to provide a line of health and wellness books. “We have a first-rate medical team that has so much to offer, and we thought it would be great to put their expertise into books,” said Todd Chobotar, the Orlando hospital’s manager of mission development and now director of publishing.

On Sept. 5, Florida Hospital Publishing will release its third title, Forgive to Live: How Forgiveness Can Save Your Life by Dick Tibbits, a psychologist on the staff and an ordained minister, and writer Steve Halliday. The book, published in partnership with Integrity Publishers, reveals the findings of a Florida Hospital/Stanford University study on the health benefits of forgiveness. Releasing at the same time are a companion workbook, devotional, and DVD.

The publishing program launched last fall with the release of Supersized Kids: How to Rescue Your Child from the Obesity Threat by Walt Larimore—a former physician at the hospital and now v-p of medical outreach for Focus on the Family—and Florida Hospital dietitian Sherri Flynt. The second title, Pain-Free for Life by Scott Brady, director of the Florida Hospital Brady Institute for Health and senior medical director of the hospital’s 16 urgent care clinics, released in July. Those books are part of a five-year agreement with FaithWords’s general market imprint, Center Street, which has right of first refusal.

Integrity, which had vied for the long-term agreement with FHP, was able to acquire the Tibbits book because of Center Street’s decision to adhere to an exclusively medical perspective, according to Integrity publisher Joey Paul. “Dick Tibbits’s conferences and the research project focus on the relationship between forgiveness and healing, so we’re doing this as a separate, one-off book,” Paul said. “We were impressed with Dick’s credentials and the research he has done.”

The seven-campus Florida Hospital is part of the Adventist Health System, which is affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church.