LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Norton Healthcare announced Friday evening that Kelly C. McCants, M.D., the pioneering medical director of the Norton Heart & Vascular Institute Advanced Heart Failure and Recovery Program and founding executive director of the Institute for Health Equity, died yesterday, November 28, 2025. He was 50 years old.
In a statement, Norton Healthcare described Dr. McCants as “a once-in-a-generation physician whose brilliance was matched only by his humanity,” adding that his sudden passing has left both the organization and the broader Louisville community in profound grief.
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Since joining Norton in 2018, Dr. McCants transformed the health system’s advanced heart-failure services from a small operation of eight clinicians into a 36-member regional center of excellence that offered cutting-edge mechanical circulatory support, complex transplants, and recovery-focused care to Kentuckiana’s sickest cardiac patients.
Perhaps his most enduring mark, however, will be in health equity. Hand-picked in 2021 to launch and lead the Norton Institute for Health Equity, Dr. McCants spearheaded initiatives that took primary care clinics into historically disinvested west and south Louisville neighborhoods, dramatically expanded mobile mammography and preventive-screening units, and laid critical groundwork for the forthcoming Norton West Louisville Hospital, the first new hospital built in the city’s predominantly Black west end in over a century.
“Dr. McCants didn’t just treat disease; he treated people who had been ignored by systems for generations,” said Russell F. Cox, president and CEO of Norton Healthcare. “He built trust where it had been broken and delivered hope where it had been scarce.”
Colleagues remember him walking through clinics in sneakers and a white coat, greeting every housekeeper and security officer by name, and spending extra minutes with patients who had no one else to talk to. In 2023, Louisville Business First named him a Health Care Hero for Health Equity, an award he characteristically accepted by crediting his entire team and the community members who “taught me what courage really looks like.”
A proud Meharry Medical College and University of Louisville School of Medicine alumnus, Dr. McCants was especially devoted to mentoring Black and underrepresented minority physicians and medical students, often covering application fees out of his own pocket and opening doors that had once been closed to him.
Details surrounding his death have not been released at the request of the family.
Norton Healthcare says it will announce plans to honor Dr. McCants’ legacy in the coming days, including a permanent tribute at the future West Louisville Hospital he helped bring to life.
He is survived by his children and a medical community that, in the words of one tearful cardiology fellow Friday night, “just lost its North Star.”