Bill Frist, M.D.
About Bill Frist, M.D.
Senator Bill Frist MD is a Special Partner at healthcare firm Cressey & Co and founder/partner Frist-Cressey Ventures, a heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, and voice of “A Second Opinion” podcast (Asecondopinionpodcast.com). He is consistently recognized among the most influential leaders in American healthcare and is one of two individuals to rank in the top 10 of each of the five inaugural Modern Healthcare Magazine annual surveys of most influential people in healthcare. Dr. Frist currently serves on the boards of publicly-traded companies Teladoc Health, Accolade, Select Medical, SmileDirect Club, and GSAH-N (NYSE), as well as on the boards of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Nature Conservancy (global). He co-founded Aspire Health, formerly the nation’s largest provider of non-hospice, community-based palliative care. Senator Frist majored in health policy and international relations at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs before graduating from Harvard Medical School and then completing surgical training at Massachusetts General Hospital and transplant fellowship at Stanford. He went on to found and direct the Vanderbilt Multi-Organ Transplant Center, performing over 150 lung and heart transplants. Dr. Frist was a United States Senator representing Tennessee for 12 years. He was elected by his peers to serve as Majority Leader of the Senate in 2003, having served fewer total years in Congress than any person chosen to lead that body in history. His leadership was instrumental in passage of PEPFAR, the law that led to the reversal of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, and in the creation of Medicare Advantage In 2003, the enormously successful program which has revolutionized care for seniors. He founded and now leads global health nonprofit Hope Through Healing Hands, the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), and NashvilleHealth, a collective impact organization focused on improving the health and well-being of Middle Tennesseans. He lives on an active farm in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife Tracy and three Australian shepherds.