Leadership at Baptist Health Louisville
Jonathan Velez (vah-lez'), MD, is president of Baptist Health Louisville, a 519-bed hospital that is part of Baptist Health, a Louisville-based healthcare system with more than 23,000 employees in its facilities across Kentucky and southern Indiana. He joined the hospital in July 2023.
Most recently, Dr. Velez served as chief operations and physician executive for Lee Health’s Gulf Coast Medical Center in Ft. Myers, Florida. He has a wealth of experience in several key areas, including building relationships with medical staff, overseeing a robot-assisted surgery program, information technology, and adopting best practices to improve the quality of patient care.
Dr. Velez began his healthcare career in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he spent 11 years as an emergency medicine physician. While working in the ER, he began his crossover to administrative roles, melding his information technology and medicine backgrounds.
In 2007, he joined Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs as its chief medical information officer after working with the system on an electronic health record project. He was then named chief information officer.
In 2012, Dr. Velez moved to the Hartford HealthCare Corporation in Connecticut, serving three years as vice president and chief medical information officer for the five-hospital system. While there, he led a 20-month effort to implement the Epic electronic health record system.
In 2015, he was promoted to vice president of medical affairs, still focusing on the Epic deployment, but also on patient safety and quality of care efforts. In 2017, he moved to Florida to join Gulf Coast Medical Center.
Dr. Velez has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Vermont, earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and completed a residency in emergency medicine at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center.
In his spare time, he is an instrument-rated private pilot. He and his wife, Oksana, an accomplished violinist, have two sons who attend Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.