For much of the past century, academic medical centers have operated on a straightforward premise: build the best clinical programs, train the next generation of physicians and patients will come. But in 2025, that model is under pressure from every direction with rising costs, shrinking reimbursements and a community that increasingly expects more convenient care.
Jason Glover, CEO of Memorial Hermann–Texas Medical Center Adult Services, is thinking hard about what comes next. His institution sits at a crossroads where the question is not whether to grow, but what growth looks like over the next few years.
“There used to be a lot of individual and physician-centric care models, and those have moved to more team-based models within our system,” he says. “I believe our future growth will be extending those team concepts beyond our own walls, whether that be payer and provider relationships that change or provider-payer-employer relationships or some mix of those, as we find new payment mechanisms, and really as we shift what is still largely a fee-for-service model to a more value-based model.”
A health system that can align incentives across payers, employers and providers is better positioned to make care both affordable and attractive.
But growth through partnership is only part of the equation. Mr. Glover is equally focused on what he calls the fundamentals: squeezing more value out of existing operations before reaching for external solutions.
“I can’t underestimate being disciplined in our operational efficiency and productivity improvements,” he said. “As capital gets reallocated, we’re focused on more consumerism and we’re focused more on enabling technologies. How do we use them to augment, but not replace, humans to have patient flow come back. Can those efficiencies free up time to allow for more brainpower to be devoted to our academic or clinical mission?”
One of the more compelling growth opportunities is geographic reach using telehealth and ambulatory expansion to extend clinical expertise out to underserved communities.
“At an academic facility, we take care of some of the sickest of the sick,” he says. “How do we balance that highly intensive care, with creating more ambulatory settings and think about how we leverage the ambulatory footprint? How do we scale it? How do we use telehealth to allow the expertise that sometimes lives at an academic medical center to extend past our walls and into other communities, even rural communities? That is a big opportunity for growth.”
A tertiary referral center that maintains close relationships with community and rural providers fulfills the public health mandate and generates a pipeline of complex cases that keep specialized programs financially sustainable. Then senior leaders can focus on growing its provider team to provide a broad range of services.
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Memorial Hermann’s growth strategy is how explicitly it centers the frontline workforce as a source of organic innovation. The system runs an internal idea platform — open to any employee, including contractors — where staff can submit proposals that leadership actively vets and implements.
“Getting close to the workforce and listening to their ideas and doing whatever we can to make those ideas realities are an opportunity to create organic growth and to sustain our mission,” Mr. Glover said.
This isn’t incidental to the growth strategy — it’s structural. In an environment where retaining experienced clinical staff is one of the most pressing operational challenges in healthcare, giving employees meaningful ownership over how care is delivered is also a retention tool.
None of this unfolds against a neutral backdrop. Memorial Hermann faces the same financial headwinds battering academic health systems nationwide: low Medicaid reimbursement, a community where one-in-four residents is uninsured or underinsured, and subsidy expirations beginning to bite. Add uncertainty around federal research funding and its downstream effects on academic partnerships, and the margin for error narrows considerably.
“We have to stay true to our mission,” Mr. Glover said. “We have to stay disciplined in the blocking and tackling of delivering a world class experience to those we serve, and then we’ll continue to look for ways that we can grow and diversify so that we can support the tripartite mission that we’re committed to.”
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