A ribbon is an agreeable management problem. Everyone can see where it starts, where it ends, and whether somebody has remembered the scissors. In late 2025, the Winchester and Sewanee campuses led by Adam Martin celebrated new signs and new names. One occasion involved a ribbon cutting; another involved lighting up the night. The photographs offered the satisfying clarity that organizational change rarely enjoys in real life.
The facilities had already begun operating as Highpoint Health with Ascension Saint Thomas. The signs made the change visible. Martin, who had led the two locations since August 2022, remained their chief executive. The lettering changed; the person responsible for helping the organizations through their next working day stayed in place.
That continuity makes his story interesting. Martin's career has moved through accounting, staffing, operations, and executive leadership. It has taken him through Tennessee, Indiana, and Virginia, then back to Tennessee. By the time his institutions acquired a different name, he had already spent years learning the less photogenic parts of running one.
Before the title, the ledger
Start in Lebanon, Tennessee, where Martin worked as an assistant controller at University Medical Center. Later, at Terre Haute Regional Hospital in Indiana, he held two distinct responsibilities: chief financial officer and chief staffing officer. Those titles place money and people next to each other in his professional history. They also offer a useful way of reading everything that followed.
A budget is an institution's set of promises expressed in numbers. Staffing is where those promises acquire names, working hours, and a place on the schedule. Martin held responsibility in both areas before moving into broader operations. His route to the chief executive's office passed through the machinery that makes a large employer function.
His academic background was in business, too. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, and an MBA at Bethel University in McKenzie, Tennessee. His postgraduate studies included an emphasis on administration in his chosen industry. On his LinkedIn profile, Bethel appears with the years 2011 to 2013.
There is a later echo of the Bethel connection on his own leadership team. Dickerson, the chief operating officer working alongside him in Winchester and Sewanee, also holds an MBA from Bethel. Their undergraduate institutions differ: Martin attended Evangel, while Dickerson graduated from Middle Tennessee State University. Their biographies meet at a Tennessee business school before meeting again on the same leadership roster.
There is an appealing lack of mystery in those credentials. The subjects are organization, resources, and responsibility. His later appointments would enlarge the scope of the work, but the underlying questions remained recognizable: who does what, how the work is supported, and how an institution pays for what it intends to do.
The Virginia stop, then a Tennessee return
In 2015, Martin joined Wythe County Community Hospital in Wytheville, Virginia. He served as chief operating officer there before the move that brought him back to Tennessee. In March 2019, Southern Tennessee Regional Health System's Lawrenceburg facility announced him as its next chief executive, with a start date of March 25.
He followed Cliff Wilson, who had been serving in an interim capacity. The appointment placed Martin in charge of a sister institution within the Lifepoint network. It was a change in responsibility within an organization whose operating environment he already knew.
The people introducing him stressed relationships as well as operations. Cherie Sibley, then president of Lifepoint's Central Division, described him as charismatic. Board chairman Stacey Shedd highlighted his operational experience and interest in community engagement. These were the expectations attached to his arrival: manage the institution, build working relationships, and participate in the place around it.
Martin's own response contained a simple geographical pleasure. He said he was “thrilled to be returning to Tennessee.” A career chronology can reduce a move to a new title and a date. Those seven words restore something human to the entry. For Martin, the next job also meant a return.
Operations
Chief executive
Chief executive
New partnership
Two campuses, one move home
Three years later, the responsibility expanded again. His Winchester appointment was announced in July 2022 and took effect on August 22. Sewanee came within his remit as well. He arrived from Lawrenceburg with experience leading a neighboring institution in the same regional system.
William Haugh, then president of Lifepoint's Mountain Division, singled out his strategic thinking and ability to build teams. Dave VanBuskirk, the Winchester and Sewanee board chair, emphasized community engagement and leadership development. The endorsements were consistent with those that accompanied the Lawrenceburg appointment. The larger assignment still depended on relationships between people.
Martin said he looked forward to working with his new colleagues as they would “find new paths forward together.” It is a modest phrase for an executive appointment. It puts the new chief executive alongside the team he is joining, with the route ahead still to be worked out.
By March 2023, Martin, his wife Anna, and their two children were living in Winchester. His professional move had become a family move. That month, the Sewanee Emeritus Association scheduled him to speak at the University of the South's duPont Library. His responsibilities now included explaining the institution to people who lived around it. The job had a local audience, and so did the person holding it.
“Find new paths forward together.”
Adam Martin, on his 2022 appointment
When the sign catches up with the organization
On March 3, 2025, Lifepoint Health and Ascension Saint Thomas announced the expansion of their Highpoint joint venture to include Winchester and Sewanee. Lifepoint would retain majority ownership and operating responsibility. The facilities would adopt the Highpoint names and share branding with Ascension Saint Thomas.
The announcement also addressed a question employees could reasonably put ahead of typography: who would be in charge? The existing leadership team would remain, and no significant changes for employees were anticipated. Martin's next chapter would take place at the same two campuses, within a broader partnership.
In September, the Sewanee EQB Club scheduled Martin and chief operating officer Greg Dickerson to discuss the expansion over its regular luncheon program at St. Mary's Sewanee. The invitation offered a social half hour, lunch, and then a presentation. Organizational structure had found its way onto the local lunch calendar, where a community can give it a more practical hearing.
The naming celebrations followed. By November, the campuses were showing off their new signs. Martin described the occasions as a chance to celebrate membership in the Highpoint organization. The public moment brought together a business arrangement, the teams expected to carry it forward, and the neighbors who would encounter the new name.
The numbers have neighbors
The scale of Martin's assignment becomes clearer in the employment figures. The campuses' 2025 community report listed approximately 760 employees and a payroll of $65,225,495. It also recorded more than $6.5 million in capital improvements. These are institutional figures, shared across an organization; they describe the operation he leads rather than a personal scorecard.
The institutional report for 2023 also placed Martin on the board of trustees as secretary. Around that table were people from banking, Nissan, the University of the South, and the two campuses. Troy Brown, a senior human resources manager at Nissan, was chair; Dan Walker of First Vision Bank was vice chair. The list gives community engagement a concrete shape: different employers and institutions sharing a table.
For an executive whose appointment announcements repeatedly emphasized relationships, that setting matters. A board connects the organization to people whose working days are spent elsewhere. Martin’s responsibilities placed him within that wider circle as well as within his own leadership team.
A payroll that size reaches beyond the office that processes it. It belongs to an employer whose decisions matter to hundreds of working lives. For a leader whose earlier roles included finance and staffing, the figures bring the two sides of his background back together. Money and people remain on the same page.
There are smaller ways to see that responsibility. In June 2025, the organization named Caroline McCullough its local Mercy Award recipient, an employee recognition established in memory of Lifepoint's founding chairman and chief executive, Scott Mercy. Martin's remarks thanked her for the influence she had on colleagues and the community.
In December, he welcomed Angela Pruett's appointment to the Winchester and Sewanee leadership team, effective January 11, 2026. Pruett moved from the network's Riverview and Trousdale locations. Alongside Dickerson and chief financial officer Shaun Adams, she appears with Martin on the current leadership roster. An executive's remit may be singular on an organization chart; the work is distributed among many people.
The name outside, the work inside
By April 2026, Martin was presenting the next annual account of the campuses' community contribution. The sequence is instructive: an appointment, a move, local meetings, a partnership, new signs, another year's figures. None supplies a dramatic final scene. Together, they describe the recurring obligations of an institution and the executive who answers for it.
Martin's professional arc has widened from financial administration to the leadership of two campuses, while returning him to Tennessee and a home in Winchester. The new Highpoint name gives that story a visible marker. Behind it sit the responsibilities he has accumulated across several towns and several kinds of job.
The ribbon gets a ceremony. Payroll gets another deadline. For Adam Martin, both belong to the same working life.