Lay of The Land #239: Akram Boutros (Nexus Bedside) — The Future of Healthcare and Nursing
Akram Boutros — Founder and CEO of Nexus Bedside.
Akram brings more than 30 years of experience as a healthcare leader, executive, and clinician. He previously served as CEO of The MetroHealth System in Cleveland from 2013 to 2022, where he led a team of more than 6,000 employees and 3,500 medical staff, overseeing a nearly billion-dollar revenue operation and the complete transformation of the MetroHealth campus and care model. Prior to that, Akram held senior leadership roles at multiple health systems across the country, and he began his career as a physician, earning his Doctor of Medicine from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences.
Akram is also a serial entrepreneur. In 2025, he raised a few million dollars of seed capital to found Nexus Bedside—a company reimagining inpatient nursing staffing and working to fundamentally improve outcomes for patients, nurses, and health systems overall.
In this conversation, Akram and I unpack his full journey and perspective on healthcare and entrepreneurship—from immigrating to the U.S. and becoming a physician, to his decade leading MetroHealth, to navigating a public and controversial departure from the public health system, and ultimately experiencing the healthcare system as a patient himself. We explore how these experiences shaped his decision to start and build Nexus Bedside, his philosophy on leadership, lessons learned as an entrepreneur, the massive opportunity for AI in healthcare, and what he believes the future of inpatient care and nursing should be.
Please enjoy this awesome conversation with Akram.
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:03:40 - The Journey of Akram Boutros, MD
00:08:45 - Formative Experiences and Lessons Learned
00:13:57 - The Complexity of Running a Health System
00:19:08 - Defining the Ideal Health System
00:25:42 - The Birth of Nexus Bedside: A New Approach to Nursing
00:30:54 - Optimizing Patient Care Through Technology
00:35:40 - Business Model and Client Success
00:42:10 - Entrepreneurial Lessons in Healthcare
00:46:44 - Building Nexus in Cleveland
00:52:12 - Reflections on the Journey
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LINKS:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akramboutrosmd/
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