06/30/2025

The Next Specialty: The Physician CEO

Healthcare organizations face growing complexity

Today, healthcare leaders in many countries are navigating an era of accelerating complexity, defined by financial pressures, shifting demographics, and evolving consumer expectations and care delivery models. To meet this moment, CEOs will need to guide their organizations through a period of reinvention and reimagination—in service of achieving both mission and margin.

Physicians may be well suited to answer this call, bringing with them a desire to improve patient care and the strengths of clinical training. In our recent McKinsey Physician Leadership Survey, more than half the respondents cite an interest in broadening their impact on patients as a top motivator for expanding their leadership mandate. And given the CEO role's unmatched ability to shape enterprise direction and patient outcomes at scale, it's not surprising that many of these physicians aspire to lead from the CEO's seat.

In fact, nearly 60 percent of surveyed US physician leaders expressed interest in becoming a CEO—a striking contrast to the roughly 15 percent of healthcare CEOs in the United States today who come from clinical backgrounds. This ambition prompts a consequential question for the future of healthcare: How can this aspiration be harnessed so that the next generation of physician CEOs can successfully deliver both health outcomes and enterprise performance?

Please select this link to read the complete article from McKinsey & Company.