Team Red, White and Blue (Team RBW) is a veterans’ organization working to enrich the lives of America’s former service members by connecting them to their communities through physical and social activity. The team recently held the Old Glory Ultra Relay to inspire veterans to prioritize their health. From May 2 to 18, 12 members of Team RWB ran 3,000 miles cross-country from the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, California, to Washington, D.C. Alternating between three teams of four runners over eight-hour shifts, they ran through the blistering heat of the desert southwest and the bone-chilling cold and snow of the Rocky Mountains while averaging a seven-minute-mile pace. The team set a world record for continuously relaying a single American flag across the continental United States while raising almost $1 million for veterans’ health and well-being.

The team’s route ran through desolate, unpopulated areas where help would be hours away if a medical emergency occurred. Fortunately, U.S. Army veteran and MD Matt Voll’s (PEMBA, ’24) experience in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Haslam College of Business’s Physician Executive MBA (PEMBA) program helped the cadre of runners prioritize their well-being despite their unique, challenging circumstances.

Haslam Project Enables Monitoring of Runners’ Physical Condition

During the PEMBA program, Voll completed an organizational action project (OAP), a required, high-impact capstone for all students. Voll’s OAP focused on using AI to make healthcare more cost effective. He applied this concept for Team RWB’s healthcare during the relay by outfitting an RV with state-of-the-art medical equipment, medicines, drugs and supplies. The equipment facilitated real-time monitoring of the runners’ vital signs through an electronic medical records system connected to smart watches each team member wore.

“Before the trip, everyone on the team underwent lab work and metabolic evaluations to assess their health,” the doctor explains. “We also reviewed their training protocols, so once we were on the trail, I could track their vital signs in near real time and monitor changes using their wearable data across multiple screens in the RV.”

Using what he learned in Haslam’s physician-focused graduate program, Voll equipped the RV for only $2,000. “Understanding how to augment the healthcare system through finance and technology came from the PEMBA program,” he says.

Finding Calm Through Caring

In 2001, Voll had recently graduated from business school when the 9/11 terror attacks shocked America. He immediately volunteered for the Army and became a combat medic, serving with the 75^th Ranger Regiment in Afghanistan. After leaving the military in 2006, he spent four years as a managerial consultant and then entered medical school, becoming an MD in 2014. During this period, he also joined Team RWB.

Working in emergency medicine during the COVID-19 epidemic, the physician saw what he describes as a healthcare system imploding from the inside, failing to efficiently deliver high-quality care. This gap drove the MD to seek a degree program that would equip him to design better healthcare delivery systems, ultimately leading him to Haslam’s PEMBA program.

In 2022, Voll’s father, to whom he was deeply attached, passed. Already disillusioned from his experiences during COVID, this was a hurt he could not shake. “I’ve been an angry person because of that loss,” Voll acknowledges. “He was one of my best friends in the world.”

That anger was still with Voll when he joined the Old Glory Ultra Relay. After all the turmoil and loss of the past several years, overseeing the health of Team RWB over 16 difficult but rewarding days granted the veteran and doctor a measure of peace. Now, he says, he realizes it was his father who guided him to take part in the journey.

“I saw parts of the country most people never will,” he shares. “Sunrises over deserts, sunsets in the mountains. I heard my dad tell me he’s okay and that I don’t have to carry the anger anymore.”

Improving the Future of Healthcare in the U.S.

Voll’s financially and medically efficient healthcare system for the Old Glory Ultra Relay is just one example of how he hopes to use his PEMBA training to deliver superior healthcare in a cost-effective way, improving upon the conditions he saw as a doctor in the trenches during the COVID-19 pandemic. He started a healthcare venture, 91WhiskeyRX, to assess clients’ conditions and build them a personalized roadmap to better health.

“My company shows that we should be doing better,” Voll says. “We can optimize people’s health, and it doesn’t have to cost us trillions of dollars.”

Main photo: Matt Voll (far left) poses with runners from the Old Glory Ultra Relay after they completed their run.

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CONTACT: Scott McNutt, senior business writer/publicist, rmcnutt4@utk.edu