American combat veterans, African orphans and employees who want to give back have all received support from MedAssets under the leadership of chairman, president and CEO John Bardis during the past several years.

Bardis, a finalist for Modern Healthcare's Community Leadership Award, founded and serves as chairman of the Health Careers Foundation at Hire Heroes USA, a not-for-profit that finds successful careers for discharged veterans. The organization has placed more than 500 and provided more than 15,000 others with employment skills, medical treatment and financial support.

The impetus came from a chance meeting with a discharged serviceman who had lost a leg in a land mine incident in Afghanistan, Bardis says. “I made a commitment to hire him,” he says. “I said, 'We'll find a job for you. We'll figure it out.' ” And MedAssets now employs 14 people who came in through Hire Heroes in addition to the many others they have helped in other ways. “Men and women are coming out of the service learning how to translate their skills into the civilian world,” he says.

In a similar vein, MedAssets employees have prepared and shipped nearly 16,000 care packages to military personnel serving overseas. The company asked around to find out what deployed soldiers wanted in their care packages and created a “super-care package” that is sent to members of a pre-selected platoon or company in a war zone every month or two.

Bardis, 55, has served on the board of directors of Heart for Africa, which provides orphans and other vulnerable children with long-term financial support coupled with short-term assistance to help with food, water, clothing, healthcare, education and other services. In 2009, Bardis donated more than $1 million, helped raise another $800,000 and spent two weeks volunteering with his family at the orphanage in Swaziland, which was able to purchase a 2,800-acre tract of land to grow food and become self-sustaining.

To encourage similar desires to pay it forward among MedAssets' more than 3,000 employees, Bardis established the Heart and Soul Program, which provides five paid days off a year to serve at a qualified and approved charitable organization; employees dedicated more than 3,000 hours to the program in 2011.

“It's our effort to institutionalize the culture of service,” he says, and a number of employees each year take their leave time to visit Swaziland. “For those who have the ability to provide help to anybody, it's our privilege and responsibility.”

Wayne Clark, vice president of corporate outreach at MedAssets, has worked with Bardis in four companies over a 25-year period. “The character of a company starts at the top and flows down,” he says. “Everywhere he's gone, the companies have been charitable in their focus and made an effort to try to ease the lives of people who have been in trouble.”