Matthew Harmody, M.D., has spent his career serving others. From decades of leadership in emergency medicine and emergency medical services to his extraordinary work as a living kidney donor and national advocate for organ donation, Dr. Harmody’s impact reaches far beyond the thousands of patients he has personally treated. 

After a long and distinguished career as an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Harmody retired from Sandhills Emergency Physicians, where he worked at FirstHealth hospitals in Hoke, Montgomery, Moore and Richmond counties. He also dedicated more than 24 years to serving as medical director of FirstHealth EMS and Critical Care Transport, helping guide the delivery of high-quality emergency care to patients across the region. 

His leadership has been particularly meaningful in Hoke County, where he served for more than six years as medical director of the emergency department at Moore Regional Hospital-Hoke and as chief of the hospital’s medical staff. In these roles, he helped support and strengthen emergency and hospital care for a rapidly growing community where access to high-quality health care is critical. 

Although Dr. Harmody’s career reflects a remarkable commitment to service and sacrifice, his professional journey into medicine began later in life due to a life-changing health experience with his own father. While Dr. Harmody was in college, his father developed end-stage renal failure at just 50 years old. Dr. Harmody wanted to be considered as a donor, but his father chose instead to receive a deceased-donor kidney. The transplant ultimately failed, and his father died at age 59.

“Most of my career, which actually started as an engineer working in the oil industry, changed entirely with my dad’s health experience. My father had kidney failure at age 50, and two things really came out of that. The care and the attention that he received at the Cleveland Clinic during his several years of illness. Everyone from the nurses to the physicians. It was really inspiring work that they did with my father,” shared Harmody. “It really caused me to reflect on what I was doing as an engineer. And while that was a successful part of my life out of school, it really wasn’t terribly fulfilling, and I thought that medicine offered me something that would be much more fulfilling.” 

That was how Dr. Harmody found himself entering medical school at the age of 30. 

“I didn’t have any experience in medicine, no family members in medicine, so I made a faithful journey down to our medical school in Cleveland, and met with the admissions director and laid out what I had done up until that point in time,” recalled Harmody. “He did [ask] did I really even know what I was getting myself into? Which was a very fair question. He sent me to the local free clinic that operated just off of campus, and I volunteered there for a couple hours, maybe once a week. I still remember to this day walking out of the clinic after my first evening there, and those couple of short hours probably far exceeded how much I really helped anyone in my current career, so that was really the deciding factor to make the change.” 

Harmody shared that the second major positive thing to come from his experience with his father’s illness was his passion and advocacy for kidney donation. 

In September 2017, at age 56, Dr. Harmody donated a kidney. His experience as a donor became much more than a personal milestone, it developed into a new avenue for service.

“I felt the need to help someone. I lived with that every day for several years with my father, and it could make a huge difference in someone’s life. I began to do a little bit of research and ended up going to UNC to begin the process of being evaluated to whether or not I could be a living donor. I matched with someone in need and donated on September 26,” shared Harmody. 

Today, Dr. Harmody is a prominent advocate for living kidney donation and serves as chair of the board of the National Kidney Donation Organization. He also helped establish the Sandhills Chronic Kidney Disease Support Group, providing an important local resource for individuals and families navigating kidney disease. 

Dr. Harmody also found an especially remarkable way to bring attention to the lifesaving potential of living donation. An endurance athlete, he joined four other living kidney donors as part of Team NKR in an effort to summit the highest mountain peaks in all 50 states. The team completed the challenge in 41 days, 21 hours and one minute, setting a Guinness World Record while demonstrating in a very literal way that living kidney donors can continue to lead active, extraordinary lives.

Few careers illustrate the meaning of lifetime achievement as completely as Dr. Harmody’s. He has cared for patients and families in moments of crisis, helped lead emergency medical services, strengthened emergency care in Hoke County, given part of himself so another person could live and uses his own experience to advocate for thousands of people he may never meet.

“I strongly feel that we’re put on this earth to help each other.  That doesn’t mean that everyone has to go into health care. It could be doing simple, random acts of kindness,” shared Harmody. “I’d like to give a big thank you to my wife Susan and our adult sons. In emergency medicine, being open 24/7, you miss a lot of things. They were always very patient with their husband and dad. And thank you to the dedicated team of people that work in emergency services. It can be a difficult career choice, but it’s a very dedicated team of people that work hard, sometimes in some very difficult circumstances, to make a difference in people’s lives,” concluded Harmody. 

The Greater Fayetteville Business Journal is proud to present the fourth-ever Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. Matthew Harmody.