CHARLOTTE, N.C., Nov. 10, 2025 – Military members and veterans, including those who work at Advocate Health, often are drawn to careers in health care because both demand unwavering dedication, mission focus and a drive to serve something greater than oneself.
Plus, lessons learned in military training and during active conflicts — quick thinking, precision and seamless teamwork — translate powerfully to the fast-paced world of hospitals and clinics. The health system employs more than 2,800 veterans across its six-state footprint, offering meaningful careers as doctors and nurses, as well as researchers, recruiters and more.
"From my experience of growing up on military bases, I witnessed firsthand the discipline, unity and shared purpose that define our Armed Forces," said Eugene A. Woods, CEO of Advocate Health. "Those experiences instilled a lifelong respect for the sacrifices our service members make — and fueled the commitment we make at Advocate Health to ensuring they receive the very best care, both in uniform and as veterans."
Over the years, the health system has earned recognition for engaging veterans once they work for the health system. Forbes has recognized Atrium Health as a “Best Employer for Veterans” on multiple occasions. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded the health system the Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award for support of employees who serve in the Guard and Reserve, as well as the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve and Extraordinary Employer Support Award, which recognizes that support sustained over time.
Given the benefits of its ability to scale, Advocate Health is in a unique position to partner with the U.S. military to boost readiness, share its expertise with patients and advance military medicine research.
Advocate Health has built systems to capture wartime trauma care lessons and implement them to improve the care across its urban and rural footprint, from Charlotte and Winston-Salem in North Carolina to Chicago, Milwaukee and rural Georgia. It has partnered with active-duty units to expand access to care during pandemics and natural disasters.
Here are some of those veterans’ stories from within Advocate Health:
Servant leaders
Since he was a child, Dr. Joseph Hsu wanted to be in medicine and wanted to serve others. When he was 17, he decided to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as a pre-med and nuclear engineering double major.
His military service that followed included a deployment to Iraq in 2006, at a time of heavy violence that produced some of the war’s highest casualty rates.
"I was fully trained formally, but the learning and training was just about to begin," he said. "No amount of training in the civilian sector gets you ready for what happens in war".
"Some of these things you carry with you forever," Hsu added. "For me, they were transformative. They’re things that really push and challenge you to innovate, develop and get techniques going. The protocols, rehab and pathways that now are incorporated into the civilian world were born out of wounded warriors."
Hsu is the vice chair of quality for the Atrium Health Musculoskeletal Institute, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and involved in several initiatives to partner with the military and work with veterans across the health system.
He said it’s clear why veterans succeed in health care careers, particularly as leaders.
"Military veterans are servant leaders. It’s a part of our culture," Hsu said. "Leadership is not about privilege, it’s about service; making sure your team has what it needs to succeed."
At a time when the health care field is changing rapidly, veterans and members of the military are able to succeed in complex systems where teamwork is critically important.
"Military veterans are comfortable with change, and that is why they do well in organizations that are growing and changing," Hsu said.
Great partnerships in innovation
When Drs. Lucas Neff and Tim Williams met as they deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, they never thought they’d be working together on a medical breakthrough a decade later.
Today, Neff is a pediatric surgeon at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he and Williams, a vascular and endovascular surgeon at the same hospital, are working on developing a medical device that could save trauma patients’ lives, if eventually approved by regulators.
"What started as two guys stuck on the other side of the world together, missing our families, turned into a great partnership for innovation," Neff said.
They’re currently testing a device that uses smart technology to inflate a balloon in a patient’s aorta to stop bleeding. The key advancement is the technology that regulates some amount of blood flow, based on the patient’s needs.
It’s the kind of device that could buy surgeons a few extra minutes with critically injured patients at a time when those minutes are the difference between life and death.
The two surgeons saw the need for such a device when deployed overseas and made a decision to "keep the band together" when they returned home.
Neff had trained at Wake Forest University School of Medicine early in his career and always wanted to go back. Today, both teach there. The school provides needed research resources to test the new device, and Neff said that having teachers in medical school who are innovating helps inspire that mindset in the next generation.
"Having surgeons, professors, mentors who are thinking differently fundamentally sparks some interest in innovating," he said. "Now, even at an early age, students are thinking about their own unique solutions to the clinical problems they see."
"I knew this was how I wanted to serve"
Dr. Eric Verwiebe, an orthopedic surgeon at Aurora Medical Center – Summit, in Summit, Wisconsin, enlisted as a combat medic in the Army in 1991, after his 17th birthday. Following his first active tour duty in 1994, Verwiebe joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard while earning his bachelor’s degree.
He took an active-duty commission in 2001 and began medical school in Bethesda, Maryland. Verwiebe began his clinical rotations in 2003 and cared for injured service members at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as part of the orthopedic surgery team. During his time at the medical center, he was amazed by the care they provided for injured service members.
"I knew that this was how I wanted to serve both our country and our injured service members, as an orthopedic surgeon," he said.
Verwiebe also worked in a San Antonio hospital that served the entire southwest region of Texas and regularly received evacuees from a wide range of trauma situations. The experience had a major effect on his professional development. The variety and complexity of cases allowed him to gain extensive experience managing complicated problems.
Now, at Aurora Medical Center – Summit, Verwiebe and the team are equipped to handle just about any type of orthopedic trauma.
Verwiebe says the most rewarding part of being an orthopedic surgeon is developing relationships with patients, seeing them progress through their injuries and regaining their function and independence.
"I relate to my patients," he added. "I served on the enlisted side and did a lot of things that make me very relatable to my patients. They appreciate knowing that their doctor has some idea of what they do".
"I grew up in a small town," he said. "I spent a lot of time on a small farm. I have done all kinds of stereotypical jobs that a person coming from a small town in Wisconsin might have done."
But among these jobs, for Verwiebe, none are greater than service to country and community.
The meaning of life
About a dozen years ago, Dr. Kevin Lobdell, system director of Atrium Health Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, received a call.
One of his patients went down on the golf course, suffering from a heart episode. Following surgery, the patient was recovering well, until Lobdell fielded another call from the patient’s wife. This time, the patient was having blood pressure issues and needed help.
Again, he got the help he needed, but this second episode is what drove Lobdell to start pushing for remote monitoring of patients. If only the patient had a blood pressure cuff and other tools to track his own health, some of these issues might be avoided.
In 2018, Lobdell was part of a team that secured a $1.1 million grant from The Duke Endowment to improve patient access and education and to engage patients and their families through remote telemonitoring.
As of fall 2025, they’ve enrolled more than 3,200 patients and counting.
It was with that background that Lobdell joined the Army Reserves in 2020, where his work has included working on remote monitoring technologies for the military. The uses are easy to understand: If soldiers in battle are wearing devices that monitor their health, medics and others can have a leg up on how to treat them if they’re wounded.
Lobdell is a clear example of how the medical skills of a health system’s experts can be useful to the military, and vice versa. In 2024, Lobdell was selected as the physician from Army Reserve Medical Command to augment the Office of the Command Surgeon during a Europe-wide simulated war exercise.
Among Lobdell’s motivations for entering the Army Reserves was the service of his father.
His dad was able to participate virtually as retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal commissioned Lobdell at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center in 2020.
To mark the occasion, Advocate Health CEO Eugene Woods commissioned a charcoal drawing of the two. The picture now hangs in Lobdell’s office.
"Atrium Health and the Army both have given me many opportunities to serve others," Lobdell said. "It’s the meaning of life."
"The people are the lifeblood of any organization”
U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Gen. James J. Kokaska Jr. knows firsthand there can be clear overlap between military and health care careers.
Based in the Chicago area, Kokaska works for Advocate Health as vice president of planning, design and construction for its Illinois and Wisconsin operations. That means he oversees construction projects for the health system, including the recently opened nine-story care tower at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago.
It’s a far different kind of project than the infrastructure construction he oversaw during deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Through those experiences, Kokaska has learned a great deal about managing construction projects in resource constrained, difficult security environments.
"All large-scale construction projects have a critical pre-construction phase that requires innovation, vision, problem-solving and key decision-making, which set the conditions for a successful project," Kokaska said.
As part of the surge in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2010, his team was charged with the design and construction management of critical aviation facilities, new aircraft runways, basing expansions, medical facilities and supporting infrastructure.
"As you can imagine, the pre-construction challenges and time sensitivity of schedule delivery required us to create design standards and programs that would expedite the start of construction," Kokaska said. "I learned many tools from Advocate Health, managing large-scale complex projects that helped me navigate this difficult period and expedite projects."
The lessons go both ways, he notes, as he brings experiences from the military back to his work at Advocate Health. Plus, leadership lessons learned can apply anywhere.
"The military has blessed me with numerous leadership assignments where I can improve my ability to lead people in difficult situations, collaborate and utilize my problem-solving skills," Kokaska said. "The people are the lifeblood of any organization, and when leading people, it is important we get it right."
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