'There's a culture of physician engagement and transparency'.

Carl Armato, president and CEO of 14-hospital Novant Health, has worked with the system's employed and affiliated physicians to put them at the center of decisionmaking, a model he says has facilitated a systemwide embrace of electronic health records. Armato, who joined the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based health system Novant in 1998 and has been the top exec since 2012, recently spoke with Modern Healthcare Southern Bureau Chief Dave Barkholz about that physician-administrative partnership, Novant's effort to improve its hospital operations and North Carolina's efforts to provide price transparency for healthcare consumers. This is an edited transcript.