Henry Ford Hospital is a large academic teaching hospital in Detroit and the flagship facility of Henry Ford Health. The hospital combines patient care, medical education and research, and serves a broad patient population across Michigan.
“Destination: Grand” is one of the largest healthcare investments in Detroit's history. What was the strategic vision behind this project?
It was a big challenge getting this across the finish line. We started the planning process about 15 years ago, but the financial crisis, Detroit's bankruptcy and then COVID all caused delays. For us, this has been a generation in the making and a dream come true.
The vision was to create a premier hub for highly specialized medical care to serve patients requiring the most intensive interventions, while strengthening the entire continuum of care. Destination: Grand will have the largest number of specialty intensive care unit beds in the region and support advanced programs ranging from brain tumors and transplant to cardiac surgery and GI care. At the same time, we're investing in rehabilitation, ambulatory care, prevention, home health and wraparound services so patients remain connected to our system before, during and after hospitalization.
When you talk about building a hospital for the future, what does that look like in practice?
We can build a beautiful building, but what really matters is what's inside it. This is a smart facility. In patient rooms, large screens will identify who has entered, their role and why they're there, helping families better understand the care journey. Every patient will also benefit from AI-powered pharmacogenetics to help determine which medications are most likely to work and which may cause complications.
But it's also about completely redesigning the emergency experience. The ED has been built entirely around patients and families, with a robust triage system designed to identify who can wait and who needs immediate care. It will feature dedicated trauma and treatment bays, as well as all private rooms—a stark contrast to older emergency departments where patients often ended up in hallways or shared spaces. We've also engaged futurists to help us plan ahead, ensuring the footprint is pandemic-ready with advanced airflow, isolation and infectious disease capabilities. Beyond the building itself, it will include one of the largest green spaces in Detroit, creating a place of respite for patients, staff and the wider community.
Where is AI creating the greatest impact across Henry Ford Health today?
About a year ago we introduced AI-powered ambient listening in our clinics. Instead of physicians spending appointments documenting, they can focus entirely on the patient while AI captures the conversation and generates a structured note. It's improved provider satisfaction, reduced after-hours paperwork and increased access because clinicians can see more patients in a day.
Beyond that, electronic medical records now integrate with mobile and wearable devices, allowing clinicians to access real-time data while AI helps optimize scheduling, billing and navigation. The really exciting work is on the clinical side. AI is accelerating drug discovery, helping us analyze massive datasets and understand molecular changes far more quickly than before. In mammography, for example, AI can identify subtle patterns invisible to the human eye and has dramatically reduced false negatives across cancer care, neuroscience, and radiology.
How is the shift toward ambulatory care changing healthcare delivery?
Ambulatory care is in our DNA. Forty years ago, Henry Ford recognized that not everything happens inside a hospital's walls. Today we have 12 acute-care hospitals and 550 ambulatory sites across Michigan. The goal is seamless, personalized, high-quality care wherever patients encounter us. For us, value-based care means moving care upstream through wellness, screening and prevention.
Hospitals are increasingly treating individuals with acute, multifaceted conditions because routine services have moved into outpatient settings; we're now performing more surgeries in ambulatory centers than in our main hospitals. When patients do require hospitalization, our focus is on safely reducing their length of stay. Because we invested heavily in home health and wraparound networks early on, we can act as an "at-the-elbow partner" for patients and caregivers long after their physical discharge.
What do you hope the Michigan State partnership will unlock for research and innovation, and what advances in neuroscience are giving you the most optimism?
Henry Ford has always been an academic institution, but unlike many peers we've never had a primary university affiliation. This partnership changes that. Henry Ford is Michigan State University's primary clinical partner and vice versa. Together we're opening a new research tower, pursuing National Cancer Institute designation and establishing a branch campus of a new medical school in Detroit. It's helping us recruit and retain top talent while expanding research capabilities.
In neuroscience, one of the most exciting developments is what we're seeing in glioblastoma. When I started medical school 25 years ago, life expectancy was about eight months. Today it's closer to three years. We recently celebrated nearly 50 patients at a "craniversary" event recognizing 10-year survivors. There is still an enormous amount of work to do, but we're identifying more long-term survivors and studying what makes them different. Advances in navigation technology have also revolutionized brain surgery, allowing us to operate with extraordinary precision.
How do you balance cutting-edge care with access and affordability?
Healthcare faces a difficult reality. Supply costs and drug prices continue to rise, yet reimbursement is flat or declining. At the same time, we're caring for a growing number of underinsured patients. Hospitals are a safety net for society, and we're trying to balance investment in advanced care with the financial realities of delivering that care.
The answer is not to choose between innovation and access. Both are foundational pillars of our mission. We use technology to identify disease earlier, bring care directly into communities and improve outcomes. Last year alone, our total community benefit was more than $1.5 billion—a number combining charity care, bad debt, and uncompensated care—because we don't believe in turning people away. Maintaining support for programs such as Medicaid and 340B is essential if we want to continue expanding access while advancing care.
What responsibility does a leading health system have in shaping the future of its city?
I've always said you will not find any great American city without a world-class health system. When the two rise in unison, there's no stopping them. Detroit's resurgence over the past decade has helped Henry Ford, but Henry Ford has also played a critical role in Detroit's revitalization. People from all over the country are choosing to move to Detroit in ways they might not have 10 or 15 years ago, and a thriving urban medical landscape is a huge draw.
Detroit remains the car capital of the world, but we believe it can become a healthcare capital as well. Henry Ford aims to be part of the national conversation about changing health for the world. Our diverse patient population gives us a unique opportunity to develop solutions that work across every race, ethnicity, age group and socioeconomic background. That's why we're becoming a central hub for clinical trials, research partnerships and innovation. We're all in.
