Ardent Health Inc.’s leaders have laid off a significant number of middle managers and streamlined the health system operator’s reporting structure to start building “a more nimble, quicker and more accountable organization.”

The cuts involved cutting managerial layers at Ardent’s corporate offices in Nashville as well as at field locations during the second quarter, CFO Alfred Lumsdaine told analysts and investors on Aug. 5. And while Lumsdaine did not specify how many people Ardent has let go of late, it is a significant number: The moves will save the company $15 million to $20 million in what’s left of this year.

“These actions are almost entirely nonclinical in nature and are intended to improve accountability and speed our execution,” Lumsdaine said on a conference call discussing Ardent’s second-quarter results.

During the spring quarter, the Ardent team also renegotiated an important insurance contract that executives say will now generate between $5 million and $10 million more than they had expected this year. Combined, those two initiatives will counterbalance the roughly $25 million of losses due to weaker-than-forecast patient volumes in the second quarter. The company’s cost-saving plans, which targeted $40 million when announced nearly a year ago, now total more than $70 million – or more than 1 percent of Ardent’s expected 2026 revenues.

Newly named President and CEO Dave Caspers, who stepped in for Marty Bonick in early June, said that the idea of standardizing processes is driving much of his efficiency push.  Among specific items, he added, is the setting up of a patient logistics command center that he said will let Ardent better handle inbound transfer patients and general logistics. Combined with team leaning more on technology, Caspers said systems like that are helping build a “backbone that makes standardization and efficiency possible while empowering our people to deliver consistent, high-quality personalized care across the network.”

Among those tech tools is a new hellocare.ai virtual nursing system. After Ardent teams ran a series of pilot programs, the company’s adoption of that system at its hospitals in Texas and Idaho has helped cut by 18 percent the number of hours spent monitoring patients in person. In June, Caspers said, virtual nurses completed 58 percent of discharges in Texas and Idaho.

Shares of Ardent (Ticker: ARDT) rose after publication of the company’s Q2 results and executives’ conference call comments. By the afternoon of Aug. 10, they were changing hands at $10.95 compared to $10.75 before the earnings report. They have now climbed more than 20 percent over the past six months, growing Ardent’s market capitalization to about $1.6 billion.