Leading with Purpose: Dr. David Foster on Faith, Healthcare Leadership, and Physician Collaboration

Modern healthcare is caught between extraordinary clinical possibility and an increasingly strained delivery system: patients have more treatment options, data and information than ever, while hospitals and physician networks must coordinate care amid workforce pressure, rising complexity and limited tolerance for waste. That pressure is only expected to grow, with the Association of American Medical Colleges warning that the U.S. physician shortfall could climb as high as 86,000 by 2036, underscoring why better care now depends not only on medical innovation, but on whether clinicians, administrators and networks can build enough trust to make hard decisions together.How can healthcare leaders move beyond transactional relationships and build the trust needed for physicians and administrators to make better decisions together — for their networks, their practices and the patients they serve?On I Don’t Care, host Dr. Kevin Stevenson speaks with Dr. David Foster, Founder and Principal of Clinical Network Collaborative, about leading with purpose across medicine, administration and faith-based healthcare. Their conversation explores Foster’s decades of clinical and executive experience, the role of mission in leadership, the need to unify the physician voice, and why clinical integration may be one of healthcare’s most urgent priorities.What you'll learn...Physician alignment starts with listening, but it cannot stop there. Foster argues that physicians often feel unheard, while administrators are actively seeking clearer clinical input. The opportunity, he says, is to move from a “cacophony” of individual complaints to a unified physician voice that can help leaders set priorities.Collaboration is becoming a survival skill in a constrained healthcare environment. Foster emphasizes that practices, hospitals, payers and health systems all operate within networks. When resources are limited, clinicians and administrators must work together to decide what services to invest in, what duplication to reduce and how to keep patient care as the shared North Star.Healthcare leaders should stop fighting the tools and start improving the system. Asked what leaders spend too much time worrying about, Foster points to the electronic medical record. His view: EMRs are not going away, so leaders should focus less on resisting them and more on optimizing them to support better practice, workflow and patient care.Dr. David Foster, MD, MBA, FAAFP, is a physician executive and healthcare strategist with more than 30 years of experience spanning clinical practice, medical group leadership, governance, clinical integration and system-level transformation. He founded Clinical Network Collaborative to help clinicians, administrators, health system leaders and payers strengthen network performance through clearer dialogue, physician engagement and patient-first alignment. Previously, he held senior leadership roles at CommonSpirit Health, CHI St. Vincent, CHRISTUS Health and CHRISTUS Spohn Health System, where he led multi-state physician enterprise operations, grew provider networks, advanced value-based care, improved quality and access, and built governance structures that elevated the clinical voice in organizational decision-making.