The primary bottleneck to better outcomes is rarely a lack of effective medical treatments; it’s the difficulty patients face when trying to access them.
In Episode 4 of Moving Health Forward, host Umair A. Shah, MD, MPH sits down with his long-time colleague Nariman Heshmati, MD, MBA, FACOG, Chief Clinical Officer at Lee Health in Southwest Florida. Dr. Heshmati shares his journey from practicing OB/GYN and serving as President of the Washington State Medical Association to leading clinical operations at Lee Health, a non-profit health system with four adult hospitals, a pediatric hospital, and a rapidly expanding medical group of over 1,350 clinicians.
South Florida represents a distinct healthcare ecosystem where cutting-edge procedures exist alongside profound community safety-net needs.
This presents unique challenges for healthcare leaders in the region: how do you deliver the cutting-edge clinical care while also trying to provide basic socioeconomic supports?
“On one hand, there are a dozen or two dozen cardiac surgeons in the country who can robotically replace a mitral valve—we have one of them,” says Dr. Heshmati. “On the other note, we are also the safety net hospital. So we have the indigent person who can’t take care of their health condition because they can’t afford their meds. We have the person who has poorly controlled diabetes because they don’t have access to fresh food. We have those sitting side-by-side on the same floor at the hospital.”
Together, Dr. Shah and Dr. Heshmati explore how clinical leadership must evolve, how health systems can dismantle operational silos, and how emerging technologies like multilingual conversational AI are breaking down barriers to care at scale.
The whole conversation is available now.
