about

With nearly 40 years of experience as a philanthropy professional, including nearly 30 years as a chief philanthropy officer and executive leader in healthcare, Mr. Bruce A. Bartoo, MPA, CFRE, launched the Gratitude Health Group in 2023. Intensely focused on unleashing the power of gratitude to create unrealized value in healthcare, Bruce utilizes his unique expertise to partner with organizational leadership in building innovative programs that not only naturally and more organically expand philanthropic support, but also serve to enhance patient experience (often improving patient satisfaction scores) while addressing and ultimately reducing clinician burnout as care team members receive heart-felt expressions of gratitude. 

Having created and perfected an innovative “culture of gratitude” in his most recent executive role as the Senior Vice President & Chief Philanthropy Officer at a ten-hospital health system in the Mid-Atlantic, Bruce brings his unique background, experience, and perspective to leading innovative change and creating essential collaboration across three areas of the healthcare organization that can be most positively impacted by a culture of gratitude. 

During the 13+ years serving in his previous leadership role, Bruce envisioned and implemented a focused strategy to create awareness around the power of patient and family gratitude, resulting in total philanthropic support growing from $19 million to $115 million in annual revenue. In addition, the organization was recognized as a “High Performer” by the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy for over 10 consecutive years. And, simultaneous with transformational philanthropic revenue growth, additional important benefits of enhanced patient/family experience and reductions in clinician burnout became a natural outgrowth from the system fully embracing a new and innovative culture of gratitude. 

Earlier in his career, Bruce led philanthropy enterprises in several other healthcare organizations, bringing an innovative approach to focusing on gratitude and how often it serves as the primary inspiration for patients, families, and community members to make philanthropic investments which advance the work of care teams for whom they are grateful. These roles included serving as foundation president & system chief philanthropy officer at Mercy – a healthcare system based in St. Louis, as well as entity chief philanthropy officer roles at ProMedica, Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and UPMC Horizon. Bruce also has professional experience in higher education advancement as well as political campaign financing and management. He has a Master’s in Public Administration from Drake University (IA) and a Bachelor of Arts from Westminster College (PA). Bruce is a “Certified Fund Raising Executive” (CFRE) and has been a member of the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy for over 30 years, with past service as a member of the Board and chair of numerous regional and international conferences.