Dermatologist Jon Ward, M.D., grew up in the Florida Panhandle. Disillusioned after just one year as an employed physician, he returned home and opened his own practice. Over the next two decades, he expanded that solo practice into a 32-location organization operating across four states, with a particular focus on providing skin cancer care in rural communities.

With that success, Ward could have done almost anything: retire early, travel the world or buy a fleet of sports cars. Instead, he decided to help buy a rural hospital.

Read more at MedicalEconomics.com.

Music Credits
Medical Education by Art Media – stock.adobe.com

Editor’s note: Episode timestamps and transcript produced using AI tools.

0:00 Cold open: could physician ownership save rural hospitals?
1:01 Meet Jon Ward, M.D.: 32 locations, four states and one rural hospital
2:05 Why he bought a hospital instead of retiring
2:41 HealthMark Regional closes, and the deal that came back around
4:44 A 1990 for-profit hospital and the reputation it left behind
5:31 The Stark law, the whole hospital exception and what changed in 2010
7:45 The thinking behind the ban on physician ownership
8:54 The workaround: own the building, not the operating entity
9:42 Raising $3.7 million from colleagues, plus promissory-note loans
11:06 USDA and Treasury financing, and a $7 million first year
12:34 Finding the profit center: why the operating rooms came first
13:41 Charity care, EMTALA and Medicaid payments that arrive a year late
15:17 Medicaid cuts, $50 billion for rural health and a $4.6 million award
16:39 Cash pay at a rural hospital: what a spine surgery actually costs
18:41 Why price transparency means little without insurer rate transparency
20:51 Service lines today: imaging, mammography and a mobile lung screening unit
23:04 $5 million to open the last wing, and codes as a barrier to entry
23:59 Winning back a community that had written the hospital off
25:33 The ask: bring back physician ownership, starting with rural
27:46 Advice for residents weighing corporate medicine against ownership
28:25 The business education no one gets in residency
31:10 One practice to 32 locations: the non-metro strategy
32:39 Model the pro forma, and don’t buy the MRI in year one
34:01 Six months of payroll he wasn’t sure he could make
35:00 Outro