Access, AI, and Physician Leadership in Community Health Systems with Dr. Larry Ward

Summary

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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast: Access, AI, and Physician Leadership in Community Health Systems

Guest: Dr. Larry Ward, Chief Medical Officer, Holy Cross Medical Group
Host: Scott Becker
Date: March 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Larry Ward, recently appointed Chief Medical Officer at Holy Cross Medical Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Dr. Ward discusses his transition into this community health system, the broader mission of Trinity Health, critical challenges such as physician shortages, current and future impacts of AI in health care, and his philosophy on physician leadership in an evolving industry.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. Introducing Dr. Larry Ward & Holy Cross Medical Group

• Background: Dr. Ward is the first Chief Medical Officer in Holy Cross Medical Group’s past decade. Previously, he spent formative years at Jefferson University and held leadership at other systems, bringing a broad perspective to community-based healthcare.
• Holy Cross Stats: 557-bed hospital, soon to expand into a 3-hospital system; employs 600 physicians with approximately 70 in primary care; 70 years serving the Fort Lauderdale community.
  • “It’s a faith and mission based Catholic health system...part of Trinity. About 600 physicians on medical staff...a terrific foundation with a great niche within the Fort Lauderdale community.” – Dr. Ward [00:32]

2. Trinity Health’s Mission and Differentiation

• Faith-Based, Patient-Focused: Trinity Health’s Catholic mission underpins care for all, regardless of background.
  • Meetings start with reflections, emphasizing the patient at the core—sometimes religious, more often simply a reminder of purpose.
  • “Every organization talks about a patient focus. Not as many really keep that promise...patients really are at the leading edge of what we do.” – Dr. Ward [03:27]
• Comparison to Other Systems: Dr. Ward contrasts his experience at Trinity, community systems, and large academic centers like Jefferson. He values the community focus and the opportunity to directly shape patient and clinician experience.

3. Physician Shortages & Market Dynamics

• Recruitment Climate in Florida:
  • Florida offers easier recruitment than some regions, yet still faces serious shortages—especially in primary care, behavioral health, urology, and ENT.
  • “Our deficit on the primary care physicians is enormous...I talk to people and they say, I can't find a primary care doctor down here.” – Dr. Ward [06:42]
  • Unique market structure: No single dominant health system or insurer in the region creates both challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
• Space vs. Staffing: Even as Florida attracts physicians, lack of physical clinic space constrains growth; innovative approaches to expanding access are needed.

4. Focus Areas for 2026

• Key Priorities:
  • Access to care
  • Financial and operational efficiency
  • Impact of federal Medicaid cuts on care delivery
  • Leveraging AI to improve workflow, support staff, and care coordination
    “One of the fascinating things will be...how we incorporate AI into things. It’s still sort of nibbling at the edges right now, but...I believe it is going to come gradually and then suddenly.” – Dr. Ward [09:50]

5. AI in Community Health Systems

• Current Use Cases:
  • Most success so far is in administrative workflows: revenue cycle, ambient listening (documentation), predictive analytics, and inbox management.
• Emerging Clinical Support:
  • Trinity, as an Epic system, is rolling out systemwide AI initiatives focusing on care coordination and reducing burdens on nurses and support staff—e.g., automating 90% of patient contact in some scenarios.
  • Dr. Ward cautions against overextending diagnosis-focused AI at present but sees efficiency and inbox support as near-term wins.
    • “It’s hard for us to maintain recruitment and retention...So, can we use AI for 90% of that patient contact?” – Dr. Ward [11:29]

6. Physician Leadership Philosophy

• Servant Leadership & System Thinking:
  • Dr. Ward emphasizes serving as a steward—balancing the clinician’s role with administrative leadership. The “voice of the clinician needs to be in everything we do.”
  • “As physician leaders...you need to think in terms of systems...How can we use a wider team so that it's not just on a physician?” – Dr. Ward [14:15]
• Advice for Emerging Leaders:
  • Balance representation of both clinicians and administrative interests
  • Think systemically about access and the patient journey
  • Design multidisciplinary approaches so care doesn’t fall solely on physicians
  • Embrace technology as a tool, not a replacement, for clinical care

7. Maintaining the Physician-Patient Bond in a Tech-Driven World

• Centering Human Connection:
  • While systems and AI scale efficiency, the physician-patient relationship remains central.
  • “We can’t forget about that individual connection...patients always trust their physician more than they're going to trust AI.” – Dr. Ward [15:52]
  • Future models must protect this bond even as workflows, teams, and technology shift.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI’s Future Impact:
  “It’s the type of thing that I believe is going to come gradually and then suddenly.” – Dr. Ward [09:50]
• On Patient Focus:
  “Patients really are at the leading edge of what we do.” – Dr. Ward [03:27]
• On Physician-Patient Connection:
  “We have to maintain that physician independence and that physician center being the center of the team and that one on one connection with our patients.” – Dr. Ward [15:52]
• On Leadership:
  “My leadership philosophy...has over time developed to be more of a servant leadership mindset where I'm a steward...and I'm the voice of the clinician as a CMO, but I'm also a part of leadership.” – Dr. Ward [13:21]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] Introduction and Dr. Ward’s background
• [01:42] Dr. Ward’s motivations and excitement for joining Holy Cross
• [03:23] Trinity Health’s mission and differentiation
• [05:32] Physician shortages in Florida vs. other regions
• [09:16] 2026 focus: access, Medicaid cuts, AI adoption
• [10:31] AI use cases in administration and clinical support
• [12:49] Advice for emerging physician leaders
• [15:52] The enduring value of the physician-patient relationship

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Summary Takeaway

Dr. Larry Ward’s conversation offers a candid look into the challenges and innovations shaping community health today, emphasizing the ongoing need for physician engagement, technological adaptability, and above all, the primacy of patient-centered care in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.

Transcript

[A]

This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant physician leader. We're joined today by Dr. Larry Ward. Dr. Ward is the chief medical officer at the Holy Cross Medical Group. He's also done a master's in public health and other degrees. Dr. Ward, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Holy Cross and about your career.

[B]

Thank you, Scott. I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to talk with you. Yeah, I'd love to talk to you about Holy Cross. So Holy Cross Health is a part of Trinity Health located in Michigan. It is. We are located in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It's a single hospital, soon to be a 3ed system. The hospital is about 557 beds. We just celebrated our 70th anniversary of working in the Fort Lauderdale area. It's a, it's a faith and mission based Catholic health system, obviously part of Trinity. As I said, There are about 600 physicians on medical staff. We have about 70 primary care physicians, about 300 total clinicians in our medical group. And I'm happy to say I'm the first CMO in the medical group in the last 10 years. The position was empty and they decided that they wanted a, a dyad clinician leader with the president of the medical group. And so I was recruited down here and was very happy to join here just a couple months ago.

[A]

Well, fantastic. And talk a little bit about what made you excited to join, what brought you there, what was the motivation? What excites you about this?

[B]

Yeah, no, so great question. So it's not just being in Florida, although that, that is a part of it. But for me it was, it was really a health system on the rise. Holy Cross is one of the top performing ministries within Trinity Health and a lot of. There's some strong leadership here and a terrific foundation of physicians with a great niche within the Fort Lauderdale community. Very well respected, long history, many firsts done at Holy Cross. But. But even now are is really poised for some great growth growing forward there. Trinity is investing a lot within the Holy Cross system. So was very excited. I felt that there was something that could really be grown here, could really be made into something that is doing great now, but has a lot of opportunity for even greater growth and opportunity going forward. So that, that was very attractive to me. I love the people that I met here, love the physicians that I met here and was happy to join this community.

[A]

Fantastic. And talk a little bit about sort of the Trinity Health system. Great compassionate empathy Based system a little bit about Trinity Health. You also spent a great year career at Jefferson University, another fantastic system. Talk a bit about Trinity Health and their mission. It's an incredibly well run organization. Mike Slobowski is a fantastic leader and talk a bit about Trinity Health and their sort of faith based mission.

[B]

Yeah, the mission based aspect of Trinity Health was a, was a large attraction for me. The, it's obviously it's a, it's a Catholic organization, but it's, it's. The key is that we're really, we take care of everybody no matter who it is. That it's really driven by that patient focus. And every organization talks about a patient focus. Not as many really keep that promise to our patients. And I think that, and I've seen this so far in my time that we're here, patients really are at the leading edge of what we do. And every meeting here at Holy Cross and at Trinity has started with a reflection, not necessarily a religious aspect, although sometimes they are, but it's more so it's just a reminder at the beginning of every meeting of why we're doing this. And there's always some aspect of that patient focus that's brought in as we begin that. And it really does go through everything that this organization does that I've seen so far. You know, it's, it's different than the last four years I spent at a mid sized health system in Delaware. And like you said, prior to that I was at academic centers. The last one was about the last ten years at Jefferson. So I have a lot of perspective, I feel about the various organizations, you know, the non religious based, the religious based kind of community systems, the ac, the large academic centers. And they're all different, they all have positives and negatives. Jefferson, you know, is a growing, you know, now a huge system with many positives to it. But it's, it's just a different environment I wanted to get and why I joined my prior position and why I'm now here at Holy Cross. I wanted to really get where in the more community based area of health care, really working within the community. We all have educational aspects and GME programs, but it's really the physicians, the other clinicians, the apps and our patients that are at the center of what we do. And for me that was where I wanted to go in my career and I've loved every minute of it.

[A]

And talk about throughout the country. We're seeing different shortages of physicians against a growing aging population. What are you seeing in Florida? It seems like a Lot of physicians want to move here, but is it still tremendous shortages? I know it's a state where it's

[B]

very hard to get a primary care

[A]

physician in many places without concierge care. What does shortages look like in Florida compared to what you've seen up north?

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, so when I was in Philadelphia and I spent about 30 years in Philadelphia, there you could recruit people, you could recruit physicians. You had to make sure because there was such fierce competition between large systems. Philadelphia has several large systems, as people know, and they, they fight for patients aggressively with each other, with most of them having very thin margins. So before you hired a new physician, you had to make sure you had enough patients to be able to do it, to be able to make them viable financially and that their program could thrive. When I went to Bay Health in Delaware, it was very different. It was more of a rural type health care. And for there we had many, many patients and huge deficits in the number of physicians, the number of the access that we had. But we just could not hire enough physicians and we relied on a lot of visa based physicians and hired a lot of apps here in Florida. It's interesting because it's sort of a mixture of the two. Here we can recruit people and get physicians down to Florida, but yet we also have a huge deficit in the number of physicians. So we could continue to hire and hire. And right now our deficit on the primary care physicians is enormous. Just anecdotally, I talk to people and they say, I can't find a primary care doctor down here. There's no single large system down here or single large insurer. So there's a lot of different health systems here. There's a lot of different insurers, some systems take different insurances, so on and so forth, but nobody dominates the market down here, which is interesting to me. It's different than what I'm used to, but still we have access issues. So I'm still learning the market here, but it seems that there's a tremendous opportunity to hire people if you can get enough space to put them, because there is a definite need among the population.

[A]

Fascinating to hear that. Interesting, isn't it? It must be so interesting to see the different markets and how that plays out.

[B]

Completely fascinating. Yeah. I wasn't sure when I came here, I'd heard that there was difficulties in access and so on, but yet to talk about and to talk to people. And we're going through a process right now to really get like new market data and it's it is, it's, you know, there are a few specialties that many places know that, you know, are particularly difficult. Behavioral health, urology, ent. These are ones that just everybody's desperate for. And primary care, Primary care is. Although, again, I could hire people. We don't necessarily have the space for it. We need to think outside the box in terms of how we do access and how we support our current doctors so that they could have like larger patient panels and so on. But, but still we. There, it's. We do need to just hire more physicians. That's, that's what we need to do, basically.

[A]

Fantastic. And talk about as you started a new role, moved down to Florida, and when you look at sort of being chief medical officer, talk a little bit about what are you most focused on and excited about as you look at the rest of 2026, the remainder of this year.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, so again, we're, you know, I think many of the same things that are in many medical groups and hospitals across the country. You know, we're looking at, we're looking at access and finance and people and efficiency and, you know, how we best manage our patients. I think the things that for this year, I think is going to be fascinating for me, obviously the impact of Medicaid cuts from the bill that passed last year federally, you know, that, that those effects are rippling across all of the healthcare system and how that impacts Trinity and Holy Cross and the other systems in the area. Something to keep a move. You know, a look on access still to me is, you know, is everybody's number one about how we, how we manage our access. I think one of the fascinating things will be, you know, how we incorporate AI into things. You know, it's still sort of nibbling at the edges right now, but it's the type of thing that I believe is going to come gradually and then suddenly. So I want to see when that sudden change happens over and where we actually apply it to what we do on a daily basis. So that'll be interesting to see what the rest of the year brings for that. In particular, I think when you talk

[A]

about artificial intelligence, we've seen so much for the last couple of years and what I almost think of as the administrative side, whether revenue cycle, ambient listening, which is, I guess, a mix of administrative, but helping physicians take back some of their time and, and so forth, predictive analytics. Where are you seeing sort of use cases on the clinical side that you're starting to see make a difference?

[B]

Yeah, I, you know, I think we're starting and Trinity is trying to take the lead on this, really be, you know, at that leading edge. We're an epic system as our most large systems nowadays. But so we're going system wide to implement a lot of things actually this month around AI, which is exciting, but I think a lot of it, you know, I think early on there were some attempts to focus on diagnosis and I think that was difficult to do. And I think AI companies have kind of ramped back on that. I think where we really have opportunities are particularly around efficiencies in what, how the physician experience and the support of the physician. You know, I think there are, there are companies now that are looking at care coordination and can we, rather than having somebody, a nurse contact every patient, can we use AI for 90% of that patient contact? You know, those are the types of things that I think as it's hard for us to maintain our recruitment and retention not just of physicians but of support staff. We can't hire enough medical assistants here. We, it's difficult for us to get nurses in most medical groups. So are there ways for us to utilize these non physician support groups to support the roles that they would otherwise do? So care coordination is one. There's some data analytics abilities, as you mentioned. I think the inbox management I think will really ramp up over time. These things that are not critical for clinical thinking, which I think is still very difficult for AI to do well, but can be a support for what the physician does clinically, I think is the area that it's going to really excel in the next several years.

[A]

No. Fantastic. Dr. Ward, you've had this great career, really impactful career leadership at the very top level. What advice would you give to emerging leaders trying to have impactful careers, particularly physician leaders?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, yes. Starting to think about, you know, how, how what would I tell people, especially as we have, you know, always the always changing environment of medicine. Right. Which is one of the reasons I love it and why I love physician leadership. There are a few things that I would focus on. I think as I've gotten longer in my career, we're always adapting our leadership philosophy. And my leadership philosophy, I think has over time developed to be more of a servant leadership mindset where I'm a steward of whatever organization I'm in and I'm the voice of the clinician as a cmo, but I'm also a part of leadership. So I need to understand both sides of it and I need to try and make sure that the physician voice is in everything we do that needs to be the key of whatever somebody does. I think as physician leaders, people often struggle how to be, how to, how to balance those two roles. How are you the physician advocate how. But also a part of administration and working with non physician leaders. And that is the biggest challenge that physician leaders have. Finding, you know, it's always a balance trying to satisfy and please everybody, which is often not possible. So most of my day is spent trying to thread the needle to do the best I can between patients, administration, physicians, financial aspects, everything else in between. The other thing I would say is you need to think in terms of systems. And I think my master's in public health, which was early in my career, really helped with that focus on how your system particularly works around access. How do patients see us? How long does it take to get into us? How can we reach out and be where they need to be? How can we use a wider team so that it's not just on a physician? I think we're really at a point where we're redesigning the physician experience. AI is a part of that, that population, health infrastructure, all of that is a part of that. But it's putting yourself in the shoes of a patient. How they access your system and how you can bring your system to them as easily as possible, I think needs to be the focus of where we're moving in the years ahead.

[A]

Thank you. It's so fascinating to watch people trying to do some things more as systems than necessarily as individuals sort of systems and teams versus individuals. Even on the AI side trying to do things as an enterprise level versus you and I plugging into ChatGPT and seeing how to systemize that to make that happen at an enterprise level. And it really is fascinating to see how that evolves.

[B]

Isn't is. But you know, to what you're saying, we can't forget about that individual connection because the, I think the space for physicians going forward is going to be that individual connection. That's what sets us apart from AI and from everything else in there. In the end, patients always trust their physician more than they're going to trust AI or a non physician coordinator or something like that. So we have to, we have to maintain, you know, strongly we have to maintain that physician independence and that physician center being the center of the team and that one on one connection with our patients. That's why we all went into medicine. And again, I need to, as a physician leader, we need to maintain that as the prime aspect of what we do and the physician importance in everything that happens around the healthcare system. So we think about systems in terms of how we build things but that physician being the center of that relationship with patients has to remain the primary thing that we focus on.

[A]

No, I think that's so right. This notion of this direct patient care to go with systems, the sort of people with technology. I think that you nailed that exactly right and I think that's where we have to go. It's not to lose the empathy and compassion that quite frankly Trinity Health is so famous for and so good at to go with systems thinking and growing and taking care of things as a system. And again your population health background is so important to that thinking. Dr. Ward, so thankful for you joining us today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. A remarkable leadership career. Thank you for taking the time with us today. Thank you very, very much.

[B]

Thank you so much for the opportunity. I appreciate it.