Dr. Ryan Stone has spent more than ten years at Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, Indiana, first as a med-peds hospitalist and now as Vice President and Chief Medical Officer. In a recent conversation on The CereCore Podcast, he made one thing clear. Every decision he makes, whether about quality, technology or leadership, comes back to a single idea. Don't forget the human on the other side of the interaction.
Stream the full episode to hear Dr. Stone's perspective on what it took to bring MEDITECH Expanse to life for physicians and nurses, what real partnership has looked like working alongside the CereCore team, and the leadership philosophy that has carried him from the bedside to the executive suite.
Dr. Stone's road to Schneck reflects a genuine calling. From the beginning he was drawn to the idea of taking care of people, even before earning a master's in biomedical science and attending medical school at Kansas City University. Along the way he fell for pediatrics, then for a combined internal medicine and pediatrics path that let him care for patients from birth through adulthood. It was during residency that hospital medicine won him over for good. "I really fell in love with hospitalist medicine and the impact you could have on a patient and their family in their most critical time of health" said Dr. Stone.
That combination of med-peds and hospital medicine led him to Seymour in 2015, where Schneck had built one of the few programs in the country structured to support it. He credits the community itself for keeping him there. Long before he understood anything about Schneck as an organization, he could feel that the people working there were caring for their own friends, neighbors and family. That same pull eventually led him into leadership, and after years of earning trust through teaching, committee work and steady presence on the floor, he was appointed CMO in March 2020, just days before the pandemic hit, a vote of confidence from an executive team and physician colleagues who already saw him as a leader.
Schneck has earned two of healthcare's most prestigious recognitions: the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and five consecutive Magnet nursing designations. Dr. Stone is proud of both, but it's the work behind them that he really wants people to understand. For him, quality at Schneck is personal, not procedural. The patients in the next room are neighbors, friends, and family. That proximity, he says, is what raises the bar every single day, and it's why the goal has never been the award itself but the standard that earns it.
Schneck's CIO Craig Rice joined The CereCore Podcast in a previous episode, How One Community Hospital Got MEDITECH Expanse and AI Right with Schneck's VP/CIO, Craig Rice, to walk through the MEDITECH Expanse journey from an executive and technical standpoint. Dr. Stone picked up the story from the clinician's side, and his enthusiasm for the change was immediate. Watching Expanse demonstrated for the first time, he says, was the moment the entire physician staff understood what was coming.
Schneck went live in August and moved quickly from stabilization into optimization, with Dr. Stone and his physician colleagues actively shaping order sets, workflows and documentation to make the system work better for everyone who touched it. He describes the shift in workflow and capability across the organization as immediate, the kind of change that is obvious to everyone the moment it happens.
CereCore's relationship with Schneck has spanned the MEDITECH implementation, hosting and ongoing optimization, and Dr. Stone speaks about that partnership with real warmth. He describes a team that worked alongside Schneck's own staff to build a product they could confidently go live with, and he is candid that the rough edges in those first few days after go-live were far fewer than he expected for a project of that scale.
Dr. Stone described Schneck's partnership with CereCore powerfully, " I can't say enough about the CereCore team that we worked with from the beginning. That team came in and worked right alongside our team to help build a product that we could go live with as a few hiccups in that first couple days of go live that I would've ever imagined."
That level of engagement, he notes, has continued well past go-live, through upgrades and priority pack updates alike. It is also why he is so direct about what the behind-the-scenes optimization work means to him personally. Every bit of time CereCore's team saves on the technical side, he says, is time he gets to spend standing in front of a patient instead of fighting with a system, an impact he calls immeasurable.
That same physician-first instinct shapes how he thinks about AI. He is genuinely optimistic about tools like ambient documentation that free physicians to focus on the person in front of them rather than a keyboard, but he is just as clear that the final call on a treatment plan belongs to the physician, with AI acting as a helpful second set of eyes rather than the one making the decision.
Asked what advice he would offer other healthcare leaders on building stronger relationships with physicians, Dr. Stone offered a philosophy that has clearly earned him the trust of both colleagues and executives. Leadership, in his view, has very little to do with a title or always having the best idea in the room. It has everything to do with being present and willing to work alongside someone until they reach the right answer together. That same physician first instinct is what keeps the patient at the center of every decision.
Asked for any final words of wisdom, Dr. Stone offered the line that frames the entire conversation. "Don't forget the human on the other side of your interactions. We can put all the technology and resources around it, but there's still a human to human interaction, and that's the most important thing."