Dr. Kristopher Crawford

Partner and Co-Founder

Unity Transitional Care

Kristopher Crawford, MD, brings two decades of experience in emergency medicine and has spent his career working on both sides of the hospital admission decision: treating patients in the emergency department and building systems designed to keep them out of it.

He remains clinically active as Emergency Medical Director at Mountain View Regional Medical Center. He also serves as Chief of the Medical Staff, elected by his physician colleagues, and sits on the hospital’s Board of Trustees. That perspective informs his work with health plans: he understands both the economics of avoided admissions and the clinical realities when an admission cannot be avoided.

His work in remote monitoring began in 2008, when Physicians Preferred Monitoring signed its first contract with SelectHealth of South Carolina, a Medicaid managed care plan serving more than 200,000 members. In an initial 120-member congestive heart failure cohort—approximately 30 percent higher risk than the plan’s own comparator group—the program achieved a 25 percent reduction in paid hospital days and an 18 percent reduction in emergency department costs. By 2013–14, it had produced a 53 percent reduction in potentially preventable events, a 36 percent reduction in total medical spending per member per month, and approximately $1.70 in savings for every dollar invested.

Later, at Carilion Clinic, rehospitalizations in a home-health population with oncology and advanced heart failure diagnoses declined from 16 percent to 3.5 percent over six months.

Today, he leads Unity Gap and serves as a partner in Unity Transitional Care of Texas. The organization’s physician-led team conducts asynchronous reviews of physiologic trends for more than 800 residents each month across Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, escalating care when the data warrants it. The model is designed around clinical judgment and timely intervention—not continuous screen monitoring.

Before returning fully to health care, Crawford spent eight years in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected five times to represent District 63. He chaired the Health Insurance Subcommittee of the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee. Across his clinical, operational, payer, and legislative work, he has been the physician treating the patient, the operator working to prevent the admission, and the policymaker helping shape the rules governing the system that pays for care.

He also writes Vanguard Optimization, a men’s health education platform that evaluates the evidence behind supplements and hormones by level of scientific support. The platform is intended for education, not medical advice, and reflects much of the health and performance content he publishes.