Beyond the Incision: Oliver Kewon, CEO & Founder , Oath Surgical

Sitting down with Oliver, the CEO of Oath Surgical, felt less like conducting a typical healthcare interview and more like getting a front-row seat to how the future of surgery might be built. As someone whose career spans clinical surgery, medical technology, venture investing, and surgical innovation, Oliver brings a rare perspective to the conversation. Early in his career he trained as a physician in the UK, with surgical rotations in orthopedics, ENT, and colorectal surgery. However, he soon realized that his real calling was not just practicing surgery but shaping how surgical care evolves. His time working with companies like Intuitive Surgical and investing in early-stage healthcare technologies exposed him to the broader structural challenges of surgical care and convinced him that incremental improvements to the existing system would never be enough.

One of the most striking insights Oliver shared during our conversation was the scale of the problem in the current healthcare system. Surgery is one of the largest cost drivers in healthcare, representing more than $1 trillion in annual spending in the United States alone. Yet a significant portion of surgical procedures that are performed in hospitals today could safely be done in outpatient surgical centers. According to Oliver, moving appropriate surgeries into outpatient environments can reduce costs by 50% to 80% while maintaining or even improving patient outcomes. This realization became the foundation of what Oath Surgical is building: a next-generation model for delivering complex surgical care in a more efficient, technology-enabled environment.

At its core, Oath Surgical is creating a national network of premium outpatient surgical centers that are co-owned and operated with high-performing surgeons. The philosophy behind the model is straightforward but powerful—surgeons should lead the system, technology should support it, and the entire structure should be aligned around delivering measurable value. Instead of simply operating facilities, the company is building a digitally integrated surgical platform that connects surgeons, facilities, and patients through a unified operating system. This allows Oath Surgical to focus on three critical dimensions simultaneously: better outcomes for patients, improved experiences for surgeons, and lower overall costs for the healthcare system.

A particularly fascinating aspect of our conversation centered on how Oath Surgical approaches data and artificial intelligence. Rather than layering software tools on top of existing hospital infrastructure, Oliver explained that the company is rebuilding the entire system from the ground up. Their platform integrates data from multiple sources across the entire surgical journey, including clinical records, operational workflows, patient-reported outcomes, inventory and financial systems, and even ambient data from surgical videos and sensors. By structuring this data across the full care episode, the platform creates a longitudinal view of surgical performance and patient recovery that traditional hospital systems rarely achieve.

This integrated data architecture enables a wide range of AI-driven capabilities designed to reduce administrative burden and improve efficiency. Tasks that often consume hours of clinician time—such as documentation, scheduling, referrals, and coding—can increasingly be automated. Oliver described this vision as moving toward “zero documentation workflows,” where surgeons and clinical teams spend less time interacting with computers and more time focusing on patient care. In this model, artificial intelligence operates quietly in the background, handling operational complexity while leaving clinical decision-making firmly in the hands of medical professionals.

Despite the growing role of AI in healthcare, Oliver was very clear th