It takes a lot to slow Anthony Hilliard, MD. At least physically.
Three years ago, Dr. Hilliard, president of Loma Linda (Calif.) University Health and CEO of Loma Linda University Health Hospitals, was in a skiing accident that “literally snapped my leg in half.” He is still healing from the injury but said he has long been compelled to explore nature.
“The trails are calling; the mountains are calling. I must go,” he said, quoting Sierra Club founder John Muir.
Dr. Hilliard’s full-speed-ahead approach has persisted throughout his healthcare career. He has served in leadership roles at the health system since 2009, including in the president role since July 2026 and in the full-time CEO position since December 2024.
The six-hospital system continues to grow under his leadership. It held a ribbon-cutting for its Emergency Psychiatric Assessment, Treatment, and Healing Unit in September, and the system is partnering with Lifepoint Rehabilitation to open an inpatient rehab facility in Loma Linda in 2028.
Dr. Hilliard joined the “Becker’s Healthcare Podcast” to discuss what he has learned from sports, why owning up to mistakes is empowering for his own team at the health system and the biggest (non-life-threatening) risks he has taken.
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What’s something that you’ve learned outside of healthcare that you’ve been able to apply to your career?
Dr. Anthony Hilliard: I’m less of an athlete now than I once was, but I played competitive sports my entire life. Even into college, I played college basketball, and you know what I really appreciate about sports is several things. One is you win and lose as a team. Your successes are successes that get to be shared by others, and your failures are also experienced by others. So it’s really this Three Musketeers attitude: all for one and one for all. That’s very important. The other thing that sports really taught me growing up is that you have to be able to work and live — and dare I say thrive — in a competitive environment where there’s pressure. You don’t show up and hope you make the game-winning shot in the fourth quarter, you’ve practiced that shot hundreds of times in advance.
Q: What would you say are your proudest moments in the basketball environment?
AH: This is the resilience of humans: When I was 20 years old — I’ve done a lot of really intense individual sporting activities — I was doing glacier climbing in the Colorado Rockies, and a boulder crushed my hand, and I lost my middle finger on my left hand and severely damaged my entire left hand. Almost lost my index finger. I’m a point guard, and to be able to come back and play competitive basketball with a significantly damaged hand … was probably more impactful than any basket I made.
Q: That is one heck of a comeback and testament to resilience. What drew you to glacier climbing? Do you still do activities like that?
AH: You know that idea that a cat has nine lives? I’ve cheated that. I’m well past that. I love the thrill of being in nature and doing things, whether it’s free climbing or whether it’s out in nature with everything on your back, to climbing the hills of Cinque Terre [Italy] in the middle of night and falling off a trail and literally falling 50 feet, being caught by grape vineyards with 500 feet below me being ocean and rocks. To just three years ago, going 100 kilometers an hour on skis, and literally snapped my leg in half, requiring emergency surgery and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. [Those types of activities are] just something that I’ve been called to in my heart.
Q: What’s important for you to do to keep yourself healthy mentally and emotionally?
AH: It’s very important that as we think about our own sense of self, we need to belong to something that’s bigger than ourselves. I’ll let people in their own walk decide what that is.
I’m a man of faith, and so belonging to a faith community creates a sense of something that’s bigger than one’s own self. And I think that’s very, very important. To that end, finding a space for you just to sit with your own thoughts in a world that’s helter skelter and on the go, and technology’s at our fingertips, and I use it as much as anybody else. But to find a period of time and a space in which you can be alone with your thoughts is so important.
When I was 42, I was checking off all the boxes, all the things Anthony felt like he needed to do to be successful. He was accomplishing, and I remember one morning waking up and being on that proverbial mountaintop and saying, “You know, just a lot of haze out there.” There wasn’t the meaning and the satisfaction I thought I would find by those checking the box successes.
I was doing it for the wrong reasons, and so I always encourage people to reflect and check yourself. Am I doing what I’m doing because I’m doing it for the right reason? Is the why in the place that resonates deep within your soul? That time alone with your own thoughts and your own self allows you to level set in your own mind where you are in your walk of what you’re trying to be.
Q: How often do you find yourself sitting with your own thoughts?
AH: I try to begin and end each day with my own thoughts, and I have some practice around that because of my injuries. I have a red light therapy device that I put over my leg as it continues to heal. I’m an early morning riser. I find that to be the time where the rest of the world is sleeping that I’m awake and I can be with my own thoughts.
I’m often up around 4 [a.m.], and I spend a good hour just in reflection. I do a fair bit of writing in my job, and I would say extracurricular writing as well. I [also] give my wife the credit. She’s a mental health therapist, and she said, “You know, even on your worst of days, Anthony, I think it’s important that you end your day with three things of gratitude.” Keep a book next to your bed nightstand and say yeah, I screwed up here. “I failed that conversation. I didn’t do very good here, but there are three things that I did that have filled my cup with gratitude.”
Q: Given the nature of your job, and certainly given the nature of your activities and the injuries you’ve suffered, you’ve had tough days. How do you move forward when you have a particularly rough patch?
AH: We often can think as leaders that the world really begins and ends with how you do, and I think taking a bit of humble pie is useful. I will say though that being vulnerable, being willing to acknowledge that you’re not perfect, and to own it, is very important. I find that if I have a bad conversation, or I expected a performer to behave differently, there is something for soulful healing, if you will, to say, “You know what? Yeah, I missed that, that’s on me.” Just acknowledging that to a wall or to a group or to a boardroom, there is something to be said about owning it and having resolution there and just moving on.
I’m not perfect; no one’s asking me to be perfect. People want me to be truthful, and people want me to be genuine as a leader. And if I can empower that in my team members as well, I think we’ll all be better off for it.
Q: You’re clearly no stranger to risk. Can you name one or two that you’ve taken where you look back and say you’re glad you took them?
AH: The biggest leap of faith for me was leaving my job as chief of cardiology and director of our interventional cardiology cath lab. It’s a world that I could have a 40-year career as chief of cardiology, and I moved into the CEO [role] of our six-hospital system two years ago. That tenure [in the C-suite] is often less [lengthy], and God willing and team willing, my tenure will be long in that position. But it’s certainly a different expectation. I could have stayed chief of cardiology for my entire career at the organization that I call home, or put myself out there in a more what I would call vulnerable position, where the tenure isn’t quite as certain, and risk two things: my tenure at the organization, and the organization in and of itself.
That’s a significant responsibility to have for that organization. And then more recently, moving into the president role of the institution, where I oversee the university and our shared services and all of the various corporations on campus [also was a risk]. … Sometimes people see things in you that you don’t see within yourself. I had no vision of doing something other than being the best darn interventional cardiologist I could be, so that would be probably what I would say in my most recent walk, the biggest leap of faith that I or risk calculated risk I’ve taken.
Q: What caused your vision to change as far as going from being the best interventional cardiologist you can be to someone who wanted to have a much larger leadership role at Loma Linda University Health?
AH: This is what it came down to: “Did Anthony Hilliard sell out to the administrative world?” That’s kind of the vernacular you’ll sometimes hear. And I thought to myself, look, there’s no greater sacrosanct thing in healthcare than a patient-provider relationship. That is a bond. That is why we’re all here to do what we do. I had the opportunity to practice that for well over a decade. And if I was busy, I may have 35 of those encounters. I thought to myself, “You know, this career path transition, if you will, allows me now to sit in a chair where I appreciate that there’s no greater importance for a system than to design structures where that bond between a caregiver and a patient is as tight as it’s ever been, and I would love nothing more than to try to figure out the best way we can do it in 2026 and beyond for over a million unique visits a year.”
That was really the deciding factor for me to transition to this role, is to say I can only do so much as one person, taking care of one patient. But to be able to have an opportunity to try to impact the way I think a caregiver delivery relationship should go to an entire organization is one that I couldn’t pass up.
