Healthcare Remix
Part reflection, part jam session. Our leaders connect history, the arts, and healthcare to offer a different take on the challenges we face and opportunities we have before us.
Perfect Days: A reframe
Hirayama in Perfect Days—a 2023 Best International Film contender—reminds us that meaning lives in the quiet, intentional ways we meet each day. Healthcare leaders face turbulence, complexity, and constant demands—yet we are the ones with the privilege to guide the future of care—and help reshape it for the better.
What Frankenstein can teach us about AI
This fall, Frankenstein rises again—and with it, a frightening reminder about creation without compassion. Mary Shelley’s warning from two centuries ago resonates today as we grapple with our own modern Prometheus: AI. In healthcare especially, AI can see, read, and process—but it cannot care, comfort, or connect.
As we build this powerful machine (monster?), let’s remember, humans animate healthcare—and keeping our humanity alive is our most vital work.
From rebels to realists: We can’t do this alone
Music has the power to remind you where you were, where you are, and where you're going. In their latest column, Chartis CEO Ken Graboys and Jarrard Chairman David Jarrard take us back to 1975 when the Boss released the Born to Run album. In it, Bruce reminds us that he couldn't go it alone and, as healthcare leaders, we shouldn't either.
Sink or swim: Healthcare’s orca moment
What can healthcare leaders learn from the young Steven Spielberg, director of Jaws, as America celebrates the thriller’s 50th anniversary? Spoiler alert: outmaneuvering a challenge as big as our healthcare system requires daring, creativity, courage, innovation, and resiliency.
Inherit the future: The Scopes trial and today’s battle for scientific progress
Progress is often met with resistance. 100 years ago, the U.S. struggled to accept the theory of evolution. Today, we face similar uncertainty surrounding technological changes, with topics like AI, vaccines, and medical research at the center of our debates—but progress only moves in one direction.
To love is to act: Victor Hugo and Healthcare
In a landscape where the essence of what it means to provide care is being questioned and redefined by the very institutions endowed to promote and foster it, we healthcare leaders are left with the work of forging a path that remains ever just.
About the authors
Ken Graboys, CEO of Chartis, began his journey not in an office, but in rural Africa, working in communities facing famine and limited access to care. It was there he saw how the foundations of health—food, medicine, compassion—could shape the trajectory of entire communities. In 2001, he co-founded Chartis with the mission to improve the delivery of healthcare in the world. His career path—from fieldwork in Mauritania to healthcare transformation—illustrates a commitment to cultivating healthier communities through thoughtful, sustainable action.
David Jarrard, Chairman of Jarrard, grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—a town shaped by science and innovation. His early career as a journalist covering human stories gave him firsthand insight into how storytelling can influence public perception and drive change, which naturally connects to healthcare, a field where clear communication can impact patient outcomes and organizational success. This foundation led him to build one of the nation’s leading healthcare communications firms.