New AVIA CEO Clay Holderman aims to help transform hospitals | ViVE 2025

Nashville – AVIA, the consulting firm, works to assist hospitals with their digital transformation, and the company’s new leader is certainly familiar with health systems.

Clay Holderman just took over as president and CEO of AVIA, beginning Feb. 10. He previously served as president and CEO of UnityPoint Health, a Midwest health system operating 17 hospitals. He also served as chief operating officer of Presbyterian Healthcare Services in New Mexico.

Holderman succeeds Linda Finkel, who led the Chicago-based firm for 10 years before deciding to retire.

In one of his first moves as the new CEO, Holderman attended the ViVE digital health conference. On Wednesday, he sat down with Chief Healthcare Executive® to talk about his new role, collaborating with hospitals, and the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation.

Holderman says he worked with AVIA during his time at Presbyterian and was very impressed with the organization.

“It was transformational,” Holderman says. “Just this power of collaboration, this culture and belief that we really did have solutions within us, and we could do a better job together than we could do going it alone, that was very attractive to me.”

“I was thrilled to be able to touch one in nine hospitals in the nation and help them on their transformation journey,” he says. (See part of our conversation in this video. The story continues below.)

Holderman says he believes his experience in leadership roles with hospital systems is going to be useful in leading AVIA and working with health systems.

“I think that's huge,” Holderman says.

“Understanding the grind that is in health care today, the payer mix challenges with the aging of the population, the staffing shortages, the supply chain interruptions, the erosion of public trust, I think that allows us to position our insights and our collaborations to make a more direct impact into sustainability and some of the things that are most impactful across the C-suite,” he says.

With AI being used in more meaningful roles within health care, Holderman sees more opportunities for hospitals and health systems to improve. He says generative AI is moving from “empty headlines and hype to actual implementation at scale.”

Holderman says it’s critical for hospitals and health systems to use technology “to do things better at lower cost.”

“It is absolutely imperative that we help lower the cost of providing health care in the country and using digital transformation to point at that is something that people across the C-suite, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, care about deeply.”

Holderman points to the growing use of AI to reduce some administrative burdens on systems and clinicians. He says that AI-powered tools for machine transcription and coding are demonstrating better accuracy rates than people.

“There's a ton of areas that we're reducing administrative burden,” he says of AI. “There's a lot of places where you really can start to reduce burden and cost and put it in place and improve accuracy.”

Holderman notes that healthcare leaders have talked about the digital front door and utilizing a more consumer-centered approach for more than a decade. Yet he says the healthcare industry lags other sectors in this area. Streaming or shopping apps remember consumers and can predict what they want.

“Healthcare hasn't moved there,” Holderman says. “We still have a proliferation of spot solutions that are often bolted on to our electronic health record provider, and we really haven't connected those journeys. That has been kind of the Holy Grail.”

When asked about what hospital leaders are worrying about, Holderman points to the nation’s aging population posing challenges for health systems.

“As our population ages, it increases the Medicare mix in our country and decreases the commercial mix in our country,” Holderman says. “Medicare, Medicaid, government payers in general, pay below the cost of delivering care, so that creates a problem. It also decreases the work pool available for our systems. And so as the baby boomers age out of the workforce, we have to change the way we provide care and the way we enable our workforce."

“So that intersection right there is what most CEOs, COOs and CFOs are wringing their hands about. And you put that in an environment of unpredictability with a deregulation agenda that hasn't yet fully unfolded itself but has moved at a pace we've never seen before … that creates a lot of angst,” he says.

Holderman says he’s excited about the opportunities ahead leading AVIA at this moment.

“We have had with AVIA, a share of mind in health systems around consumerism and the consumer digital experience, and that's important,” he says. “But right now we're expanding our share of mind into sustainability and actually changing the administrative cost profile, actually changing care design and actually solving some of the fragmentation in healthcare. And to me, working more broadly across our health system, members and partners is really exciting.”

When asked if Finkel offered any advice, Holderman says, “I think Linda is very protective of the culture, and she should be."

"We have phenomenal talent at AVIA," he says. "We have deep insights that come from people who have spent the last decade learning from the industry, but also from our members, and just really protecting that culture and keeping our talent is the number one way to keep providing value to our members.”