In this episode of the Healthcare Plus Podcast, host Dan Collard sits down with Don Taylor, president of Don Taylor Leadership, LLC, and adjunct professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s School of Public Health, to explore one of healthcare’s most underutilized assets: its nearly 700,000 advanced practice clinicians.

Taylor brings a perspective few can match. A retired U.S. Air Force colonel with more than 45 years in healthcare, he commanded the busiest trauma hospital in Iraq as the only non-physician to hold that role. There, advanced practice clinicians (APCs) were indistinguishable in many ways from the physicians working alongside them. That experience shaped a conviction he has carried ever since: The healthcare system has underestimated what nurse practitioners, physician assistants, CRNAs, and other advanced practice clinicians can lead and do.

This episode, recorded as part of the run-up to the Rewiring Healthcare: Foundation to Future conference to be held October 20-21, 2026, in Nashville, TN, frames APCs not as gap-fillers but as a largely undeveloped leadership pipeline with real potential to reshape care delivery, physician well-being, and healthcare costs.

Listeners will learn:

1. Why healthcare is at an inflection point on how it develops and deploys advanced practice clinicians
2. What vertical development means for APCs, from dedicated leadership training to creating a legitimate path into senior leadership roles
3. How horizontal development could extend APC practice into prevention, primary care, post-acute care, and end-of-life settings
4. Why the APC conversation is “physician-and,” not “physician-or,” and why that framing matters for well-being across the care team
5. How AI augmentation could support the safe expansion of APC practice, particularly in primary care and low-intensity settings
6. Why Taylor says less than 10 percent of healthcare workers using AI are formally trained on it, and what that means for health systems right now

This is a conversation for any healthcare leader thinking seriously about workforce strategy, care redesign, and what it will take to meet the access and cost challenges ahead.