Leadership built around radiology practice, operations, and growth.
ARDIS is led by physician and operational leaders with experience in radiology practice management, clinical operations, and strategic growth.
Jeff Kinlaw
Chief Executive Officer
Practice independence. Governance and oversight.
Jeff Kinlaw has spent his career keeping a radiology practice independent while the specialty consolidated around it. He came up through hospital-based radiology administration, took the top operating seat in 2012, and has held it through private equity rollups, payer consolidation, and rising coverage costs. Atlantic Radiology is still physician-owned.
Before Atlantic Radiology, Kinlaw spent six years as Vice President of Administration at Savannah Chatham Imaging and Chatham Radiologists, P.A., running the business side of a hospital-based radiology group. As Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic Radiology Associates, he has grown the practice to more than twenty radiologists, built hospital and outpatient coverage across Georgia and South Carolina, and opened three outpatient imaging centers, most recently the Eisenhower Imaging Center in Savannah.
He has run remote after-hours coverage for more than a decade, holding it to the same requirements a hospital does: turnaround, quality assurance, workflow, and reading capacity. ARDIS is built to those requirements.
He serves as Treasurer on the executive committee of Merit IPA, a physician-led association formed to keep independent practices viable against consolidation. That conviction runs through ARDIS, which he leads Atlantic Radiology in building to extend a physician-owned practice into remote coverage without adopting the economics that turned remote radiology into a commodity.
Brian Helmly, MD
President
Clinical standards. Accountability for the read.
Dr. Brian Helmly trains radiologists, credentials them, and still reads. He came up through a teaching hospital’s radiology residency, ran that program for six years, and now leads the physician practice behind ARDIS. He has spent his career defining what a good read requires.
He earned his medical degree from Mercer University School of Medicine and completed an internal medicine internship and his diagnostic radiology residency at Memorial Health University Medical Center, where he served as chief resident and administrative chief resident. He completed a fellowship in body imaging, cross-sectional imaging, and MRI at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.
Dr. Helmly joined Atlantic Radiology Associates and the Memorial faculty in 2014 and served as radiology residency program director from 2015 to 2021, determining when physicians were ready to read independently. He is now president of Atlantic Radiology Associates. An assistant professor at Mercer University School of Medicine, he continues to interpret complex body and cardiac imaging and perform body and chest interventions.
The standard he set in the reading room is the standard ARDIS reads to: subspecialty depth, defined expectations, peer review, and accountability for the read.
He is board certified in diagnostic radiology by the American Board of Radiology.
Chris Kersey
Chief Development Officer
Growth and partnerships. Operational strategy.
Chris Kersey has been on every side of hospital radiology: delivering it, running it, and buying it. He started on the clinical floor in cardiovascular and interventional imaging, then moved into hospital operations and later radiology contract and coverage strategy. That range shapes how he builds ARDIS.
He spent more than a decade as an administrative director at an acute-care hospital, where he opened a freestanding outpatient diagnostic imaging center, ran imaging and cardiovascular service lines, led teams through multiple radiology group transitions, and managed more than $25 million in capital equipment.
He then moved to the buyer side, directing radiology contracting across a national footprint of more than 170 hospitals. He negotiated coverage with private-practice and PE-backed radiology groups, from the facility level to the corporate suite, as the national radiologist shortage drove coverage costs sharply higher. He evaluated remote coverage partners the way ARDIS’s own buyers will. It is the standard he now holds ARDIS to.
He joined Atlantic Radiology in January 2026 to lead growth, partnerships, and development across the practice, with ARDIS at the center of that work. He is building ARDIS, Atlantic Radiology’s remote radiology platform, to be the coverage partner hospitals can hold accountable and the one radiologists choose to stay with.
He holds an MBA from Georgia Southern University.
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