When Tom Levanos talks about process improvement, he does not describe it as a technical exercise. He describes it as a way of growing people.
That mindset runs through his work as director of business intelligence and performance excellence at Mid-America Transplant in St. Louis, where he helps teams use data and continuous improvement processes to make better decisions in real time. It also explains why teaching keeps resurfacing across his career, from the classroom to ministry to hospital leadership to organ donation. For Levanos, the methods matter. But the deeper purpose is human.
In talking about the Lean Transformational Framework, he says, “Lean is, in its essence, about building people. And so is teaching. It’s all about how we grow people to make the world a better place, serve our neighbors and serve our community.”
Those ideas have made him an influential bridge builder in a field that depends on coordination, trust and a willingness to keep learning.
Shaped by family in education
Levanos grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, in a family shaped by education. His father was a principal. His mother was a reading specialist. Long before he worked in analytics, he was the 11-year-old who built a database of his football card collection and delighted in entering the data and generating reports. He later studied chemistry and physics at Harvard, but the more telling through-line may be his instinct to organize information in service of a bigger goal.
He spent the early part of his career in ministry and education, including time as an elementary school math teacher and as a leader in Child Evangelism Fellowship where he earned an MBA from Liberty University online while working. While at the fellowship, he said, he found himself asking for whatever data was available and using it to guide decisions. Later, in hospital leadership roles in St. Louis, that instinct became more formal through Lean transformation work, where he helped lead process improvement efforts across surgical services, inpatient units and ambulatory care.
By the time he arrived at Mid-America Transplant in late 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic, he knew the kind of work he wanted to do: help organizations solve hard problems, use data more intelligently and create the conditions for people to improve together.
He joined an organization already known for that kind of culture. Mid-America Transplant’s long commitment to performance excellence, including its use of the Baldrige framework, gave Levanos a setting where continuous improvement was not an add-on. It was part of the organization’s operating philosophy.
“Mid-America Transplant is a two-time recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and one of the things I love about working here is the culture of performance excellence,” he said. “When I joined, it already had a long history of continuous improvement, was using data to make decisions, and deeply believed in the importance of collaboration.”
That culture was tested almost immediately. After Levanos’ first weeks included a steep introduction to the complexities of organ allocation, the pandemic upended normal operations. Hospitals restricted access. Family conversations moved onto virtual platforms. Workflows had to be rethought quickly. Yet Mid-America Transplant adapted fast, and Levanos saw firsthand what happens when a strong culture meets a crisis: teams can pivot without losing sight of mission.
Today, his work focuses on helping others do the same.
Ongoing learning is key to improvement
He leads a team of performance excellence advisors and business intelligence professionals who support Mid-America Transplant’s organ, tissue and support work systems. The advisors are embedded with leadership teams and frontline staff, helping with problem-solving, change management and skill development. The analysts help move the organization beyond backward-looking reports toward real-time situational awareness to diagnostic insight and then on to predictive analytics and ultimately to prescriptive analytics to create decision support tools.
In practical terms, that means bringing structure to some of the field’s most complex work.
One recent initiative has focused on organ referral management, the series of interconnected processes that begin when a hospital refers a ventilated patient who may be eligible for organ donation. Eligibility, neurological status, clinical trajectory and family readiness can all shift quickly. The work is dynamic, emotionally charged and operationally demanding. Levanos helped facilitate a multidisciplinary effort to clarify what information is needed, when it is needed, and how teams can use data visualization to recognize triggers for the next step in the process.
The goal was to increase the number of donation conversations with families. The team surpassed its original 30 percent increase target and recently saw performance nearly double over a three-week period.
For Levanos, that result is important not because it represents a finished solution, but because it reflects the discipline of ongoing learning.
“It never ends,” he said of improvement work. “Even if it was the perfect process yesterday, today’s a new day.”
That philosophy also shapes his connection to the Organ Donation and Transplantation Alliance (The Alliance).
He became involved through Mid-America Transplant’s longstanding support of the organization and through an invitation from colleague Lindsey Speir, vice president of organ operations, to join faculty for The Alliance’s organ donation webinar series. He is now in his third year helping organize and facilitate webinars. He also serves on The Alliance’s AI Resource Collaborative, where professionals from across the field share projects, compare approaches and try to avoid reinventing the wheel. “We collaborate on projects to educate the wider community about how transplant centers and Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs) are leveraging AI tools to save more lives.”
That involvement has been a match for Levanos’ own view of what the field needs most: spaces where people can learn from one another honestly and apply what they learn to better serve patients, donor families and colleagues.
It never ends. Even if it was the perfect process yesterday, today’s a new day.
Teaching that changes lives
I feel alive when I’m teaching.
His orientation toward mentorship is not abstract. It is embedded in how he leads. He speaks with admiration about developing problem-solving skills in others, about serving as a trusted thought partner rather than a distant expert, and about the energy he feels when someone takes an idea back to their own organization and uses it to change practice.
“Teaching is at the core of who I am,” he said. “I am an analyst, but I’m also a teacher. I’m an engineer, but I’m also a teacher. I feel alive when I’m teaching. What I love about it is being able to share insights and principles that change people’s lives. The opportunity to have that kind of impact on other people that affects what they do and the course of their lives is deeply meaningful.”
That helps explain the unusual coherence of a career that might otherwise look eclectic. The former math teacher, ministry executive, hospital improver and OPO leader are not separate identities. They are expressions of the same instinct: to make complex things understandable and useful to other people.
Outside work, Levanos’ life is full. He and his wife, Sarah, have been married since 1999 and have six children, ranging in age from 25 to 10, with their first grandchild arriving earlier this year. He coaches his son’s soccer team, hikes with family and speaks movingly about the lessons his youngest daughter, who has Down syndrome and autism, has taught their family about patience, joy and care. They live in Hazelwood, a suburb of St. Louis.
Levanos’ Christian faith is of the utmost importance to him; another way he expresses that faith is by serving as chairman of Righteous Rides, a local nonprofit that provides cars for missionaries while they’re on furlough in the U.S.
Levanos is analytical, but not detached. Structured, but not rigid. He thinks in systems, but keeps returning to people. In a field that is under constant pressure to adapt, that may be the kind of leadership the moment requires. Not louder expertise, but more generous learning. Not a claim of having arrived, but a commitment to keep asking better questions.
For Levanos, that is where progress begins.
