St. John’s Helped Alumnus Heed the Call to AI Health Care and Faith

Throughout his life, Ed Glynn, M.D., M.B.A., FAAFP ’93C has strictly adhered to this advice from his father, Philip Glynn. “He would always say, ‘If you don’t answer the call you hear, then you will never be able to rest.’”

“I heard the call,” said Dr. Glynn, “and I embarked on a journey to answer it.”

His journey inspired him to consider the priesthood, launch a career as a physician, and, eventually, hone his current role as Chief Clinical Officer for RhythmX AI, an artificial intelligence (AI), precision-care platform for doctors to deliver compassionate care. The organization aims to bridge the gap between AI and humans to create a whole-person approach to primary health care.

St. John’s proved to be the perfect place for him to forge his path. “The University provided a tremendous environment for me to see what my future could potentially be,” said the father of five, who resides in Brentwood, TN, with his wife, Christina, an art psychotherapist and pianist.

He arrived at St. John’s as a seminarian who wanted to embrace the University’s Vincentian religious order and mission. He was studying for a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish and volunteered to serve as a chaplain at the former Manhattan General Hospital, using his fluency in Spanish to help patients who only spoke that language navigate their communications with medical personnel and other staff. This was during the time of the AIDS epidemic when little was understood about the disease.

“Manhattan General Hospital was where I was first introduced to health care,” said Dr. Glynn. “I was bilingual because of my excellent professors and colleagues at St. John’s. None of my patients were bilingual in English and Spanish, and it was there that I saw the lack of communication between them and their medical teams. The team would enter the patient’s room, speak English, and leave. Then, the patient, if they were conscious, would turn to me, or their family would ask me, ‘What did they say?’”

Those interactions convinced him to change the course of his life. “I always had the feeling that I wanted to be a servant. I thought that would take place in the religious life I initially chose,” he recalled. “But it turned out that I would serve in medicine as a physician.”

The confidence and support he received from his St. John’s professors and becoming proficient in Spanish helped Dr. Glynn to make a direct leap from earning his bachelor’s degree to attending medical school. “The first time I ever looked through a microscope as a medical student was just after I earned my B.A.,” he said. “I realized that, like Spanish, medicine was a new language for me to learn. I also realized that, given the right environment, I can meet whatever challenge is put before me, as long as I am surrounded by people who would encourage me, lift me, support me, and work as a team to help me succeed—just as the professors at St. John’s did.”

Dr. Glynn worked as a family primary physician before hearing calls to enter other aspects of the health-care field. These include serving as Chief Medical Information Officer, and later, as Chief Health Information Officer, at HCA Physician Services Group, which is based in Nashville, TN, and is the largest, for-profit health-care system in the world. He was also Director of Medical Informatics at Bon Secours in Richmond, VA. There, he established and led the ambulatory clinical informatics department.

Dr. Glynn is deeply thankful for the “educational rigor” he experienced at St. John’s. “I could not have received a better education at any other institution in the world than what I got at St. John’s,” he said. “I have never stopped learning and having that hunger for learning. The University deepened my desire to challenge my mind.”