Built by a Veteran Who Lived the Problem

Eric Gardner is a disabled U.S. Air Force veteran who served over two decades in the military medical service corps before transitioning to the private sector. His military career instilled a relentless focus on mission execution, operational discipline, and taking care of people — values that are embedded in every aspect of Wingman Health.

After leaving the service, Eric rose through the ranks of healthcare leadership, serving as Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation & Transformation Officer at WellMed Medical Management (an Optum/UnitedHealth Group company), where he led enterprise-wide digital transformation for a network serving over 1 million Medicare beneficiaries. He implemented automation and digital workflows that generated $92M+ in documented savings.

Most critically, Eric served as Director of Enterprise Referral Management at WellMed, where he built the referral management program from the ground up — establishing policy and standard operations across 10 referral centers, deploying new technologies, and saving $30M in just two years through smarter referral routing and shared decision-making. He collaborated directly with Optum to build a referral utility for enterprise-wide use.

It was during this work that Eric saw firsthand how broken the referral and prior authorization process remained for smaller practices — the ones without enterprise IT teams or million-dollar budgets. That insight became the spark for Wingman Health.