Courtesy Photo | Dr. Stephen Ferrara, then the acting assistant secretary of war for health affairs,...... read more read more
Supporting the warfighter, sustaining medical skills, and strengthening the health care system are three key pillars of providing “health care for the people who defend our country,” says the top Department of War doctor.
Dr. Stephen Ferrara, an experienced clinician, combat veteran, educator, and health care leader, recently reflected on the pivotal work of the Military Health System in 2025, which delivered visible gains in readiness-focused partnerships, increased productivity, revamped credentialing and privileging process, and early deployments of artificial intelligence tools to give clinicians more time with patients.
On Jan. 20, 2025, Ferrara was appointed as the principal deputy assistant secretary of war for health affairs and immediately stepped in as the acting assistant secretary for health affairs until the official nominee, Keith Bass, was confirmed by the Senate Jan. 5, 2026.
Bass has now assumed duties as the assistant secretary.
Ferrara is a retired U.S. Navy doctor with 25 years on active duty and remains a practicing physician. Prior to rejoining the DOW, he was the Chief Medical Officer at the CIA. He also served as the deputy director for clinical operations for the National Capital Region, the DOW’s largest health care network. He currently serves as an interventional radiologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and is a clinical professor of radiology and radiological sciences at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
In this interview, Ferrara discussed the critical priorities for the MHS, such as upgrading infrastructure, maintaining clinical readiness, and strengthening the pipeline of talented professionals dedicated to delivering the best possible care for warfighters.
Following are edited excerpts from the interview, which can be viewed in its entirety on www.health.mil:
Question: You often talk about the “3 S’s” for the Military Health System: supporting the warfighter, sustaining our skills, and strengthening our chain. What do they mean?
Ferrara: Those principles underpin our mission: support the warfighter. We provide health care to the people who defend our country, and that's what makes us unique as a health care system. There are many great health care systems in America — but there's only one great American health care system that goes to war. Fundamentally, our focus is to support the warfighter.
Sustaining our skills means our learned skills must be maintained. I liken it to how our aviators have to get flight hours or how the trigger-pullers go to the range. For our health care professionals, it's working in our MTFs (military treatment facilities) where we're taking care of patients and keeping sharp. We have to be great because our warfighters deserve our very best.
On strengthening our chain: We stand on the shoulders of many great people, both in the military and in military medicine — so it's on all of us to make sure that we pass along that wisdom. Our MTFs are a giant force-generation platform. We graduate 16,000 medical technologists with a variety of skill sets every single year. If we were a university, we'd be the biggest one. We have graduate medical education programs. We have nursing training programs across our entire enterprise. We are always training people to be able to take that baton from us and continue to be a world-class health care system.
Question: It's been an action-packed year when you look back at 2025. How would you characterize a few of our greatest successes?
Ferrara: First of all, we perform on the big picture with great success, including increasing our partnerships. I think we've done a lot to bring in more patients, higher-complexity patients, which improves our force-generation and our skill-sustainment platforms. We've brought in more Medicare patients, and we’re really happy to be able to take care of them. Similarly, with the Department of Veterans Affairs, we've strengthened our partnership to take care of America’s veterans.
We've made significant efforts to reduce administrative burden and improve quality of life. I'm very sensitive to the burdens we place on those who care for patients, because that's what they love to do. We now have universal privileging, which is a significant breakthrough, as it eliminates low-value administrative work such as renewing privileges or obtaining transfer briefs. If you're good enough to work at one MTF, you can work across the enterprise. It also helps our mission by increasing agility, capacity, and capability by giving us the ability to utilize our personnel where and when we need them.
We rolled out ambient listening, an artificial intelligence-powered tool to help bring humanity back to health care. There’s the burden of how much note writing providers have to do, where people are taking work home. With this new tool, you can have a nice, captured conversation with your patient, talk to them, and really be focused and centered on the patient. Ambient listening rolled out at four sites this fall and we're looking to distribute that across the enterprise in 2026.
Question: Speaking about AI in a broader context, are there other priorities that you've set for the MHS to incorporate that technology?
Ferrara: We’re in a golden moment for medicine in terms of all the technology occurring, and AI is a big element of that. AI can also accelerate personalized medicine with the molecular and genetic techniques that we have. For drug discovery and development, AI can enable better therapies for patients.
Clinicians can use AI to make more rapid diagnoses and more rapid treatments, and technologies to empower and enable those frontline medics and corpsmen to be able to do prolonged field care. We’re leaning into our forward-deployable technology platforms, using tools enabling medics and corpsmen right at the point of injury to begin documenting the service member’s medical record. To support clinical decision-making, technology can provide access immediately to guide care for those service members, so we can maximize survivability in the war fight.
Question: You spent a significant amount of time this year going to the deck plate and visiting MTFs around the world. What are your biggest takeaways from those visits, and have you had the chance to incorporate any of the feedback that you've learned when you've been on the ground?
Ferrara: It's always really energizing and restorative for me to get out to the field and see where the work is done. I try to meet as many staff as I can, whether I'm in the operational unit or at an MTF. One of the things I share with them is why it's so important for me to go to the field. Here at the Pentagon, we’re making a lot of decisions, but we have such a large and complex health care system … sometimes the nature of the information gets heavily filtered by the time it gets to me.
When I go to those places, I can learn what it's like to be there. I don't think people at our MTFs or operational units are a mere row in an Excel spreadsheet. There's a lot more to it than that. These are people who are taking care of patients. It's really helpful for me to hear their stories, and I learn a lot from them. Whether it’s simple or about policy, I come back with a punch list of things to help fix.
Question: Can you talk a little bit about what happened at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier in January 2025, one of your first experiences as acting assistant secretary?
Ferrara: Walter Reed, the President's hospital, experienced facility challenges including flooding. Like many of our facilities, they have aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance. I compliment their staff for moving heaven and earth to ensure they always took care of their patients. I went out there and walked the spaces, and then was able to go right to Congress and say, “here are the infrastructure problems, and we need support.” In the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, they gave us $2 billion specifically because of those efforts. We can apply it to help close some of the gaps at our facilities with the greatest challenges for infrastructure. I think we came out of it really well, and that's where that kind of advocacy on the Hill can be invaluable.
Question: What are some of the biggest resource-related challenges and successes for the MHS right now?
Ferrara: I'm a people-oriented leader — I believe having not only the right number of people but also the right skill types and in the right places — because health care is a very personal craft that we do.
We faced challenges early in the year with our civilian teammates as we sought to preserve many positions, but we were very successful because we were able to show how valuable everyone on our team is.
In the last several months of the fiscal year, we implemented policies and increased revenue collections by about $700 million. That's really exciting, because we can take those resources and we can use them to hire people, work on infrastructure, and focus on things that we need.
The National Defense Authorization Act (Fiscal Year 2026) was passed, and we're getting a top-line increase as a department. I'm looking forward to more financial resources that we can then deploy to improve health care for our warfighters and beneficiaries.
Question: What’s the value of welcoming TRICARE For Life beneficiaries back into certain MTFs for patients and for providers?
Ferrara: First and foremost, we're a military family. The opportunity to welcome our TRICARE For Life patients, our seniors, back into the MTFs where they want to get their care is the right thing to do, because it's bringing people in who want to get care from us. They trust us. They've been with us for most of their life.
It also provides high-quality, outstanding care for patients. They get their medications, imaging, and specialist visits, and they have a great patient experience. It's great for skill sustainment when health care professionals are seeing more complex patients, continuing to hone their skills and keep them sharp.
Question: How do you see strengthening the partnership the MHS has with the Department of Veterans Affairs?
Ferrara: The VA can have more demand than they can supply, and we often have more supply; we have excess supply. It’s a great opportunity to meet both of our missions across the country. Veterans may have more complex medical issues than our young, active duty personnel who are often healthy. It provides a robust clinical mix for us and is culturally aligned. Veterans enjoy receiving care at our MTFs. It provides another source of revenue, and it's good for the taxpayer. It’s a great opportunity and unique in government, where we can have wins across the board.
One example of how this has been successful is in El Paso (William Beaumont Army Medical Center). The VA and the hospital have partnered, referring 12,000 surgical patients a year to us. This can generate high value for our combat readiness mission in neurosurgery, orthopedics, and general surgery.
Question: What message would you like to share with the MHS force?
Ferrara: I’d like to thank them for the work they do. During my site visits, one thing that inspires me is the common refrain: “We just find a way to get the job done.” I know that folks have innovation and ingenuity — but most of all, it's driven by a focus on mission, on taking caring of patients, and on being ready to defend the country. I am fighting hard on their behalf every day. I'll continue to do that. That's what I consider my top priority and my primary mission.
| Date Taken: | 01.09.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 01.12.2026 09:00 |
| Story ID: | 555952 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 27 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Top DOW doctor: ‘Fundamentally, our focus is to support the warfighter’, by Robert Hammer, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
