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I've spent nearly 30 years helping healthcare organizations navigate periods of…
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Celebrating Black History Month
Celebrating Black History Month
Each February we celebrate Black History Month – a time to reflect on and honor the achievements of Black Americans and…
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A Perioperative Manifesto
A Perioperative Manifesto
When Anesthesia Needs to Be More than Anesthesia Growth. Relationships.
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Marty Bonick shared thisEpic didn't announce a new feature this week. It revealed a new identity. I spent this week at Epic's Users' Group Meeting and CEO Council, in the room with health system leaders from across the country, and that's the realization I utlimately walked away with. Judy Faulkner used the keynote to reframe what Epic is - a platform spanning clinical workflows, AI, patient engagement, finance, workforce, payments, research, and clinical operations. I’ve long said for too long, we've treated our caregivers as data entry clerks and EHRs as input tools. We poured a mountain of data in and extracted little useful information back out. That's what's actually been changing. Cosmos, Epic's data brain, now spans 320 million patients and 23 billion clinical encounters, and this week Epic unveiled Ergo, a generative-AI layer built to turn that mountain into real-time insight clinicians can use at the point of care. The technology is starting to work for the caregiver instead of the other way around. As an industry, we now have an obligation to put that information to work for patients. There's no excuse left not to. That's not an EHR vendor. That's an insight engine. And a partner in care. That's the real headline from this year's UGM, and if you were just looking for the “wow” feature, you might have missed it. The technology conversation is basically over. Every system in the room (nearly half of the country's hospitals) now has access to tools that work, and the capability to fundamentally change the way we interact with patients. Which means the bottleneck just moved. For decades, the constraint in healthcare technology was the vendor. Could Epic build what we needed fast enough? That constraint is gone. The bottleneck isn't Epic anymore. It's us. The gap that actually separates organizations now is readiness - whether your people, governance, and culture are built to disrupt current workflows and transform to embrace the art of the possible. Since its inception, no organization had ever posted a perfect Gold Stars usage score. This week, for the first time ever, Baptist Health in Jacksonville did. Same platform as everyone else in the room. A different level of readiness to actually use it. Call that being a gazelle, not a turtle. I left this week believing I've seen the future. And it's closer than any of us realize. The real question isn't whether the technology is ready. It's whether we are. Will we embrace the opportunity to transform, or try to slow down the most transformative (AI) technology this generation has seen, just to make it move at our pace? The organizations that win the coming years won't be the ones with the newest features. They'll be the ones that truly put patient interest at the center and treat adoption, workforce readiness, and governance as seriously as the technology itself. Gazelle, or turtle?
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Marty Bonick shared thisI stood in front of Mount Rushmore last week and listened to the evening ceremony, and it’s still been on my mind. Four presidents, chosen to represent four chapters of a country's story - its founding, its growth, its preservation, and its development. What struck me wasn't the granite. It was the idea underneath it - that the people carved into that mountain weren't there because they got everything right. They were there because they moved the country closer to what it was supposed to be. Progress, not perfection. An unfinished project, handed forward. I've spent my career in healthcare, and I couldn't stop thinking about the parallel on the drive out. We have a founding ideal too. Care for people. Relieve suffering. Help them to live better than we found them. And if we're honest, we've drifted from it - not out of bad intent, but under the accumulated weight of process, cost, and complexity. Somewhere along the way the system started organizing itself around the institution instead of the person it was built to serve. The reminder I took from that mountain is that drifting isn't the end of the story. This country's greatness was never in getting it right at the start. It was in the willingness to keep closing the gap between the promise and the reality - generation after generation, never quite finished. Healthcare is at one of those moments. For the first time, we have tools capable of helping people close our own gap - between the care we promise people and the care they actually get. Whether we use them for that, or just to make the current system a little faster, is a choice. That’s the promise. It always has been. But possibility was never the point, what we choose to build with it is.
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Marty Bonick shared thisIn my last post, I said the mission continues. Here's one reason I believe that so deeply. I've come to think AI may be the most consequential technology to reach healthcare in my career — and I say that as someone who's watched it from a few different vantage points: running systems, taking a company public, sitting with investors, and thinking hard about where this industry goes next. But the reason it matters to me isn't the technology. It's the people. For most of the last two decades, healthcare technology arrived as more — more clicks, more screens, more documentation, more distance between the caregiver and the patient. We asked our nurses and physicians to work for the technology, and they did it, because they're the most dedicated people I've ever worked alongside. But it cost them something. What's shifting now is that, for the first time, technology is starting to work for the caregiver instead of the caregiver working for the technology. A physician or nurse getting to look a patient in the eye again instead of a screen — that's not a small thing. That's the whole thing. I've also learned to be honest about the pace, and this is where I think the "disruptors" get it wrong. AI in healthcare is going to be evolution, not revolution. The winners won't be whoever demos the flashiest model — they'll be whoever solves the unglamorous problems of messy data, reworking clinical workflows, and building trust. But the pace of that evolution will speed up. And the value will accrue to the people and companies who understand the difference. Technology alone rarely creates value. Organizations that know how to adopt and scale it do. That’s the part I find most compelling right now — not the technology for its own sake, but how leaders build and govern organizations that can translate innovation into better experiences for caregivers, better outcomes for patients, and sustainable value for the organizations that serve them. The next decade won’t be defined by who builds the smartest model. It will be defined by leaders who can connect technology, governance, operational discipline, and capital with the human side of healthcare. That’s the conversation I want to help shape.
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Marty Bonick shared thisAfter nearly six years leading Ardent Health, I have stepped away from my role as CEO. As this next chapter unfolds, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude. Thank you to the 25,000 team members who showed up with purpose every single day - through a pandemic, a historic public offering, and every challenging and rewarding moment in between. As I have always believed, healthcare is a team sport, and the Ardent team is among the finest I have had the privilege of being part of. Thank you to the board, our leaders, community partners, and team members across the country who dedicated their energy to fulfilling Ardent's purpose every day. The work mattered. It still does. I also recognize that healthcare is entering its most transformative era yet. The convergence of AI, digital care delivery, new payment models, and a fundamentally different patient-consumer relationship is reshaping everything - faster than most realize. This is not a moment to step back - it's is a moment to lean in. That's exactly what I intend to do. In this next chapter, I am looking to Thryve. More to come. For now - thank you, Ardent. The mission continues.
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Marty Bonick shared thisSharing in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month and thinking of my friend Darrell Freeman who left this earth too soon. Thank you for your heartfelt words Brian Doheny, FACHE, and reminding us of the importance of asking for help and being of help when needed most!Marty Bonick shared thisThis is a wordy post, but it carries a very personal and important message. I hope reading it is as impactful to you as writing it is for me… When it happened it was one of those moments that you never forget. It felt like the wind being knocked out of me, I couldn’t breathe for an instant. Paused. Then took a deep breath. My first best friend, a mate through my life’s journey, was gone. Abruptly. John and I met in first grade. We had a casual friendship lasting through grade school but it intensified in high school as friend groups shapeshifted like the sand in a desert. By college we were very close, even though our interests, passions and career decisions went in different directions. By adulthood, we were old comfortable shoes that we enjoyed slipping into for momentary conversations. No need for warm ups or small talk. Best man in my wedding he was, and I started my family early. Though he was on a slower “settle down” path, John exhibited an almost juvenile exuberance embracing my wife and young children, to their delight. My people were his people too. A few years later John met his love and started his family. I was there. As our lives evolved through the highs and lows common to many of us, we were there for one another. In the end, he was my confidant, and I his. We spoke often the last several years. A quick call here and there about a random thought or issue driving home from work, to the grocery, or while traveling. Looking back now I am so grateful to have had this outlet with someone I have known since we were 7 years old. May 17, 2025 is the date when it happened. One year ago. Were there warning signs? Yes. Did we talk about them? Yes. In the end was our trust so natural that I was deceived? Perhaps. More could have been done. I could have done more. A good friend reminded me of a saying that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. He enlightened me on the importance of intervening at a moment of crisis which may only be a flashpoint for a few minutes and may dissipate in a matter of minutes should the right words and actions be employed. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. It is also an opportunity of a life. But the individual does not always allow it. So, in honor of John, your family and friends like John, and Mental Health Awareness Month, I urge everyone to remain vigilant with those we love, to intervene when our gut tells us to, and to be “present” when that moment of crisis presents itself. We can make a difference! If this message resonated with you, please repost to your networks. Thank you #nami #loveyourfamily #loveyourfriends #mentalhealthawarenessmonth #988
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Marty Bonick shared thisArdent’s Chief Consumer Officer, Reed Smith, shares a great reminder that our patients desire the same experience from healthcare as they expect in their daily lives. #MakeHealthcareBetterMarty Bonick shared thisWhy “consumerism” in healthcare isn’t what you think it is For years, we’ve talked about healthcare consumerism as if it meant treating patients like Amazon shoppers… …It doesn’t. And that framing has cost us a decade. Healthcare consumerism isn’t about copying retail. It’s about recognizing a simple truth: people now arrive at our front door with the same expectations they have everywhere else in their lives - clarity, speed, dignity, and the sense that someone knows who they are. When those expectations aren’t met, they don’t complain. They just leave. Quietly. To the urgent care down the street, the virtual-first competitor, or the system that answered the phone faster. The real work isn’t building a “consumer experience.” It’s removing the friction that made people feel like a transaction in the first place. That’s the foundation everything else sits on. AI, digital front doors, navigation tools - none of it matters if we haven’t decided, as an industry, that the human on the other end of the encounter is the point. 🎙️ From the archive: Touch Point Episode 483: The Market That Competition Forgot Chris Boyer and I dig into what the last decade of digital investment was actually accomplishing, and where the consumerism frame helped vs. where it pointed the work in the wrong direction. Worth a listen if this post resonates. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eVjSZV9s #HealthcareConsumerism #PatientExperience #DigitalHealth
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Marty Bonick shared thisGreat read from my friend Dan Collard on the power of building trust and the importance of building up great young leaders to lead the next generation!
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Marty Bonick shared thisIt was another beautiful Nashville spring day for a round of golf at the Hermitage Golf Course for an important cause. We were proud to host the 5th annual Ardent Cares Classic—our largest fundraising event in support of the Ardent Cares Foundation. Thanks to the incredible generosity of our sponsors and volunteers, we raised more than $260,000. I’m grateful to everyone who helped make this event possible to ensure the Ardent Cares Foundation can continue supporting our team members by providing emergency financial assistance when disaster or illness strikes.
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Marty Bonick shared thisWe’re taking the next step in modernizing care delivery at Ardent Health. This week, we announced an enterprise partnership with hellocare.ai to expand AI-assisted virtual physician care, virtual nursing and intelligent patient safety capabilities across the organization. By standardizing on a single, integrated platform, we’re enhancing patient safety, extending clinical capacity and supporting frontline teams with technology that helps them practice at the top of their license while improving patient safety and access to specialty care. This partnership builds on our proven success with virtual nursing and virtual specialty programs and advances our broader digital transformation strategy — embedding AI into care delivery in a practical, clinically responsible and scalable way. https://lnkd.in/eJMvmAYG
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Congratulations Ethan, partnerships ate the key to transformation and progress- excited to watch you lead and grow!
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisMarty Bonick reacted on thisA few days later. It’s wild. I’ve received some incredible recognition throughout my career, but being inducted into the Public Schools Hall of Fame means something different to me. Before the CEO title, the awards, and the boards, I was just a kid in Nashville public schools trying to figure out what was possible. A nerdy tech kid who found something he was good at and had people who believed in him. Teachers encouraged me. People opened doors. Mentors challenged me. Friends cheered me on. People prayed for me and with me. And somewhere along the way, I got the opportunity to open a few doors for others too. Maybe some kid coming through those same public schools will see my story and think, Maybe I can too. And yes… my mom took the Hall of Fame trophy home. It’s hers. She deserves it.
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisMarty Bonick reacted on thisNashville has lost one of its greatest builders. Dolly Parton passed away today at 80, leaving behind a legacy that reaches far beyond music. In 2019, the Nashville Entrepreneur Center inducted Dolly into our Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame, recognizing her not only as an iconic entertainer, but as an entrepreneur and philanthropist whose vision created lasting impact through the Dollywood Foundation, Imagination Library, and countless other initiatives. Dolly understood something every entrepreneur can learn from: success isn't measured only by what you build for yourself, but by what becomes possible for others because you built it. She built businesses. She built opportunities. She built community. And she never stopped giving back to the place she called home. We're grateful that Nashville's entrepreneurial community had the opportunity to honor her legacy, and even more grateful that future generations of founders will continue to learn from it. Rest in peace, Dolly. Your impact will keep building. ❤️
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisMarty Bonick reacted on thisDolly Parton is one of the greatest Tennesseans to ever live, and what she accomplished in one lifetime is impossible to measure or replicate. Her grace, humor, deep compassion and faith, contagious energy, and zest for life made her admired and beloved by all. Twenty years ago, I stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and reflected on her innumerable accomplishments. I was proud to call her a constituent and truly inspired by her constant love for and investment in the people of Tennessee. We all know her for her record-breaking music. But those of us in Tennessee also know her for Dollywood, an investment that became an economic anchor for East Tennessee and Sevier County’s largest employer. We know her for the millions she gave and raised for those impacted by the 2016 Sevier County wildfires, her foundation’s investment in East Tennessee education, and the countless other donations she made throughout the Volunteer State. For more than three decades, her Imagination Library donated 300 million books to children across five countries. Dolly once explained, “When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. … The seeds of these dreams are often found in books, and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.” Dolly’s genius and generosity planted seeds of hope and possibility for people in communities around the world. As I closed my remarks twenty years ago: Dolly Parton, I thank you. America thanks you. Photo credit: Mike Curb
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisMarty Bonick reacted on thisThe JAMA authors are right. AI is a better diagnostician than me. And I've never been less worried about AI taking my job as a physician. Last week JAMA published a Perspective claiming autonomous AI will outperform physicians at diagnosis by 2030. No human in the loop. The AMA pushed back hard. Most doctors are arguing with the data. I read the data. It's not close. JAMA Network Open, 2024: AI alone - 90% diagnostic accuracy Physicians alone - 74% Physicians WITH AI - 76% We made the AI worse. We dragged down the machine. Of course we did. Let's look at self-driving cars. Full autonomous robot axis have 68% fewer accidents than humans. A robot doesn't get road rage. It doesn't finish a 12-hour night shift at the hospital and drive home frustrated and exhausted. But we do. We carry emotions, biases, and energy levels in to every decision. No matter how hard we've studied our craft, we can't hold every pattern in every dataset. Pretending otherwise is ego, not medicine. But here's what is completely missed in this conversation: Diagnosing rare or challenging medical conditions is a nominal part of being a doctor. What I've learned over 20+ years is the art of medicine. Listening to a patient in pain. Deciding NOT to order a test. Noticing the tissues planes in surgery feel wrong and taking a new approach Handing a scared patient the tissue box. Looking them in the eyes and saying "you're going to be ok, I've got you." (Try getting reimbursed for any of that work . . . don't worry I'll wait.) No algorithm delivers that. But honestly, our broken system barely delivers that either. It hands us <15 minutes per visit and grades us on throughput. So if AI catches the zebra I'd miss while clicking buttons on my behalf so I'm not spending 2 hours a day charting then I say . . . Bring it on. The machine can have it. But the patient is mine.
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisI’m incredibly excited to join GuideWell. Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work from multiple sides of healthcare, as a President of a national health system, Chief Operating Officer of a provider organization, Chief Population Health Officer of a value-based care company, and now a health plan. One thing has remained consistent: we make the greatest impact when health plans and providers move beyond the traditional transactional relationship and work together around the people and communities we serve. That’s what makes this opportunity so exciting. GuideWell has a unique position in Florida and Puerto Rico with a deep commitment to the communities we serve. I’m looking forward to working alongside an outstanding team to build stronger, more strategic relationships with physicians and health systems, relationships that bring together affordability, quality, access, value-based care and innovative care delivery solutions. There is tremendous opportunity to rethink what a health plan–health system partnership can look like: moving beyond contracts and individual initiatives toward shared strategies, aligned incentives and solutions that meaningfully improve the health and healthcare experience of our Members. I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited to get to work. The next chapter is about partnership, and turning that partnership into meaningful impact for the communities we serve.Marty Bonick reacted on thisI’ve always believed that some of the biggest opportunities to improve healthcare happen when health plans and providers stop thinking about the relationship as transactional and start working as true partners around the people and communities we serve. That’s why I’m really excited to welcome Ethan Chernin to GuideWell as Vice President, Provider Solutions & Strategic Alliances. Ethan brings a unique combination of experience across health systems, provider organizations and value-based care. He understands how to build strong provider partnerships, align around shared outcomes and, most importantly, turn strategy into action. That experience will be incredibly valuable as we continue building out our Care Delivery Solutions organization. We created Care Delivery Solutions to bring together our provider strategy and relationships, value-based care capabilities, care delivery assets, and enablement around a common goal: improving affordability, access, quality and the overall healthcare experience. With Ethan joining us, we now have the leadership team in place to take that work to the next level. We have a great team, a lot of momentum and an exciting opportunity ahead of us to build deeper partnerships with providers and develop new models for how we work together. Really glad to have you on the team, Ethan. Welcome to GuideWell! Tracy Williams Raul Daza Marie Been, RN JD Chad Rubin Rick Kohn, CFA An Le Tyler Grossi Jennifer Shehata
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Marty Bonick reacted on thisMarty Bonick reacted on thisI’ve been thinking lately about what makes community involvement truly meaningful. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside people who give generously—not only financially, but with their time, experience, curiosity and willingness to listen. One lesson continues to stand out: meaningful change is rarely the work of one person. It happens when people come together around a shared purpose, learn from one another and decide that they can make a difference in their community. That’s one of the things I value most about philanthropy and nonprofit service, the synergy that is created when we work together. #impact100nashville
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Marty Bonick liked thisMarty Bonick liked thisI handed Claude Opus 4.8 15 years of my own transformation methodology and asked it to rebuild the whole thing. The diagnostics. The operating-model designs. The pilot charters. The board narratives. The arc I learned one Fortune 100 program at a time. "Big Consulting" sells that arc as a $1.5MM engagement. Claude reorganized mine into 22 executable skills ↓ Every step in a methodology earned its place because a program broke without it somewhere. The assumption audit is there for a reason. So is the decision-rights map. So is the risk register nobody wants to write. For 15 years the constraint was execution cost. Running the full arc took a bench of analysts and a quarter of calendar time, which is why it bills seven figures. Rebuilt as skills, the analytical half runs in an afternoon. In order: 1. Diagnostic (skills 1-6). Assess the situation, audit the assumptions, name the growth barriers, rank the initiatives. 2. Discovery (skills 7-10). Map the workflows, identify the AI use cases, size the value, test the data readiness. 3. Design (skills 11-15). Draft the target operating model, assign the decision rights, plan the handoffs. 4. Deployment (skills 16-19). Scope the pilot, set the success criteria, build the risk register. 5. Operating (skills 20-22). Schedule the audits, track the KPIs, write the board narrative. You finish with a clean analytical baseline, lighthouse pilot candidates, a target operating model, and a pilot charter a sponsor could sign. Here is what the rebuild could not absorb. The judgment. The political navigation. The production-deployment risk work that decides whether a program is still alive at month 12. Those live in the operator, and the guide says so plainly. Naming the pattern is half the work. The other half is the political move. The full guide, the one people call The McKinsey's Guide to Claude, has all 22 skills with every prompt scaffold in plain text. Free. Comment "METHOD" below and the full 22-skill guide lands in your DMs. 1/ Like this post 2/ Drop "METHOD" in the comments 3/ Make sure we are connected. The DM only gets through if we are. ♻️ Share this with one operator whose AI program owes an answer this quarter.
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