The work beyond the awards stage.

This morning, I was at the LABJ Healthcare 2026 Leadership Awards at the Biltmore. Alex Yarijanian and Carenodes were both nominated.

We did not win. Carenodes did not win either. And genuinely, that is fine—the field was stacked.

Before the ceremony even started, a friend, Christine, said something to me in the lobby that stayed with me: most of our day-to-day in this work is dealing with what goes wrong. Denials. Ghost networks. Contract language written to be ambiguous on purpose. You spend so much time in the failure modes that you forget to look up and notice what is actually working.

Today was not about the trophy. It was a room full of people—Peter Slavin from Cedars-Sinai, Kristen Cerf from Blue Shield Promise, Rachel Start from City of Hope, moderated by George Greene—being honest about the hard parts of running healthcare in Los Angeles.

Not vendor-speak. Real tension: AI as an access accelerator versus AI as a new weapon in the payer-provider fight. Frontline staff who know things leadership does not. The fact that healthcare may account for only 20% of health outcomes, while the other 80% is whether someone has stable housing.

None of that shows up on an awards stage. All of it is the actual work.

I also want to name two people who shaped how I think about this industry long before today: Aliza Arjoyan, now Chief Network Strategy and Engagement Officer at L.A. Care after building serious runway at Blue Shield, Humana, and SCAN; and Tina Shabanian at Health Net. Mentorship in this space is quiet and usually goes unacknowledged. Not today.

Congratulations to everyone on the list, and to The Therapeutic Play Foundation for making it to finalist. Good field. Good day.