Brian K. Ahmedani, PhD, MSW, of Henry Ford Health has been named to the 2026 TIME100 Health list—recognition that shines a wider spotlight on a suicide prevention model his team helped develop and scale worldwide. Known as the Zero Suicide model, the approach is built on a simple but ambitious idea: When health systems consistently screen for suicide risk and follow with evidence-based care, more lives can be saved.
Now, with the model in use across the U.S. and in more than 30 countries, a major study in JAMA Network Open documented sharp declines in suicide attempts among participating health centers, Ahmedani feels that the recognition brings fresh momentum to work that is still evolving and expanding.
Henry Ford Health is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
“The TIME100 Health List is important because it helps showcase our work and our topic,” Ahmedani said. “Our mission is gaining attention and it’s a reflection of the incredibly hard work that our team is doing every day to save lives.”
In an interview with the AMA, Ahmedani shared updates on the initiative, discussed TIME’s recognition, lessons learned and new insights around achieving his team’s goal of zero suicides.
AMA: Since launching the Zero Suicide model, what changes needed to be made in workflows and training?
Ahmedani: The most important thing is to partner with clinicians working on the ground. We cannot make something that doesn’t work within their system. We have to be pragmatic about things and work within real world clinical care, and I think the secret of being successful is that we’re not telling anyone what to do. Our goal is to work together as a team.
What we found is that when you design these programs with people, they want to use them. There is not a one-size-fits-all package that works in every system. It's about tailoring the experience, using the menu of options that we have available to fit within the local environment and culture.
AMA: What are common hesitancies when it comes to implementation, even in systems convinced of the model’s value?
Ahmedani: It’s the same that we find with every part of care. Getting reimbursed for services, access, having enough physicians and other health professionals, having enough appointment slots, training, and making sure that our physicians and care teams know what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it. Do they know who to reach out to when people have increased risk?
It’s really about all the logistics that hamper the entire health care system, making people comfortable with doing this work and doing it in the environment they’re in.
AMA: What are some of your latest findings and how have they influenced the model’s adoption?
Ahmedani: The studies that came out last year were extraordinarily important because up until then, Henry Ford Health was the only system that had published data showing that this model worked. There was skepticism about whether people could actually do this. Would it work in other places?
We needed the data to show that it actually worked, and those studies provided that information. They provided a credible baseline for us to communicate and talk with other health care systems across the country and, frankly, around the world.
AMA: How about health systems with different resource levels or care structures?
Ahmedani: The people who do the work are all different. We’ve worked with single primary care offices, in collaborative partnerships with local behavioral health providers for cross community partnerships, which usually doesn’t exist among local organizations. We work with clinics where patients speak different languages and we’ve had to adapt to the cultural relevance of some of the documents locally. We’ve also worked with refugees.
We had to adapt some of the tools and messaging for different communities with different values about mental health and suicide. We have to understand those values and create a structure that’s most effective for reaching those populations. For some programs, we’ve had to consider family dynamics and how husbands and wives and families function culturally and how they receive information and navigate health care in general.
AMA: What do skeptics say about the goal of zero suicide and how do you respond?
Ahmedani: This is such an important question because there are lots of people who say, “We shouldn’t go for zero. It’s impossible.” I would argue by asking: What is the right goal, then? Are we going to celebrate reducing suicide by 10%, knowing that 90% of those at risk are still dying? That could be your brother or sister, my parents or my kids.
We do not believe that simple reduction is the ultimate goal. I believe that we must strive for perfection, recognizing that we may never get there, but we are going to keep doing everything we can and fighting every single day to prevent every single suicide we possibly can.
Zero as a goal has proceeded further than we ever thought possible, and the reality is that while we may not be able to prevent 50,000 suicides a year in the United States, there were a couple of years when we had zero suicides at Henry Ford Health, and we never thought that was possible. So, I say that we have to care about every life, and while our goal of zero is no guarantee that we’re going to save every life, it is a guarantee that we’re going to do everything we can to get there.
AMA: What about crossover applications outside of health care settings?
Ahmedani: One of the major gaps in the space is cross sector, cross community collaborations, so we have to meet people where they are. We have a couple of really exciting community collaborations in research right now, including a partnership with jail systems across Michigan and Minnesota. Twenty percent of people who die by suicide were recently involved in the criminal legal system, and they come in and out of health care systems every day and physicians don’t know anything about that.
Those patients lose access and connection and get switched to new treatments in new environments, and often without places to live or resources or jobs. You can understand how even the smallest instability can change the dynamics of a life.
Our goal is to reach out to those people proactively. We designed a program that uses informatics to connect publicly available jail release data with our health care system records. When we find out that one of our patients was released from jail, we reach out to them immediately, whether they’ve indicated any risk of suicide or not, but because the risk for that population is so large.
We’ve also been working on school-based models where the services can be provided by nurses or teachers or other personnel, and that creates a community connection with health care resources. When people are really sick, there has to be a connection to a health care environment where they can get the highest levels of treatment and care. We have an opportunity to utilize low impact and low intensity interventions in a lot of different places, which creates community and cross sector connections that allow us to reach people where they’re intersecting within their communities to identify risk and get them the help and care they need, when and where they need it.
AMA: How might the TIME100 recognition help advance the program?
Ahmedani: The TIME100 recognition gives us a platform that people can identify with, and it creates positive energy and momentum. I’m thankful for the attention that this has given us and the help to keep building this unique opportunity to build programs that fill gaps in health care. The recognition is certainly important in supporting our partnerships in the space, and it makes it even more exciting and motivating to continue moving forward.
We’re grateful to TIME for highlighting suicide prevention and how important it is to health care. We are only going to be successful if we all work together and recognize how important this is.
Many people on our team have been touched by suicide, and so we are trying to save the next person. Doing this as partners, as a team, and being recognized for the hard work that our team has done is an opportunity for us to step back and say, “Hey, we’re making progress.” There is still a lot of work to do, and this provides us with a greater platform for not only spreading the word but moving forward with the work.
