Dan Pickett is seven months into leading Albany Med Health System — and already organizing the business around two distinct modes of growth.
Albany (N.Y.) Med is the region’s only academic health system. It operates four hospitals, Albany Medical College, a visiting nurses program and approximately 1,000 physicians across a large footprint that spans northeastern New York and parts of western New England. Its patient base ranges from urban safety-net communities to rural populations with few other options for specialty or trauma care.
Shortly after taking over as president and CEO in December 2025, Pickett rallied the system’s roughly 17,000 employees around a five-year vision he calls First Choice 2030.
“First Choice is about being First Choice for patient experience, for quality, and for clinical excellence,” he said during an interview with the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast.”
Mode one, running the current business as effectively as possible, gets most of the near-term attention. As health systems nationally have accelerated their ambulatory investments, Albany Med is putting its more than 100 ambulatory sites to work as a growth platform.
The foundation of that growth is physician retention. If the medical staff isn’t whole, access suffers.
“We really have to look at how we’re retaining and rewarding our medical staff, how we’re attracting the absolute best to Albany Med, because solving for that and having a really healthy, forward view and healthy medical staff is going to have big impact on access,” Mr. Pickett said.
From there, the system is focused on length-of-stay management, post-acute efficiency and ensuring the right patients are being cared for at the right facility. Albany Medical Center Hospital serves as the system’s referral center for its most complex cases. Patients who can be managed at a community hospital or at home should be.
“Closer to home is better for everybody. It’s better for the patient. It’s better for the family that many patients depend on. It’s better for our providers, and it’s better for our community,” Mr. Pickett said.
Those principles are translating into capital commitments. Albany Med plans to open a new ambulatory surgery center in its Southern market at the start of 2027 and is pursuing emergency department expansion projects at Albany Medical Center Hospital and Glens Falls Hospital. The system is also developing aging and wellness programming in Saratoga. The investments reflect a broader sector shift, with ambulatory expansion reshaping leadership structures and capital priorities at health systems across the country.
Mode two is a longer horizon. The current income statement carries significant volume dependency and Mr. Pickett sees that as a structural limitation that could hamper progress.
“There’s a lot of volume dependency in our income statement today,” he said. “And mode two is what are the emerging opportunities we have? What are more consumer centric, consumer driven opportunities that we need to be thinking about.”
He pointed to wearables and patient biometric data as one such opportunity.
“I wear a Whoop, and you think about all of the opportunity you have around biomarkers and biometrics and how will we be more wellness oriented in terms of our understanding of our patients and how we take that data and make that data available to our physicians and our medical staff,” Mr. Pickett said.
Mode two is minimal in Albany Med’s revenue today. Mr. Pickett is allocating capital toward opportunities that could become material by 2030.
“We’re looking at both the short view that we have on being really effective at what we do today and then how we need to be thinking more out and allocating capital with some of the things that are really exciting for all the stakeholders in Albany Med in the future,” he said.
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