When Dr. Mohan Suntha sees patients, he asks about more than their symptoms. He wants to know about their experience with the valet parking, the cafeteria, their inpatient hospital room.
He broadens the scope of his questions to match the scope of his role, because Suntha is more than his patients' radiation oncologist—he is the president and CEO of the University of Maryland Medical System.
As a medical student, Suntha was not interested in becoming an executive. He was deeply engrossed in his specialty, invigorated by the "unique role physicians play within the social fabric of our society," he told Newsweek.
But as Suntha's career progressed, he realized that there was a whole other side to health care: a world of numbers, figures and deals. The clinic and the C-suite were inextricable, and to maximize his impact, he needed to understand both.
So he went back to school, received his master of business administration (MBA) degree, and began charting a new path.
"As a physician, the patient who is in front of me, the patients who make up my practice, the department that I work in—that's where I could have influence and some level of scale," Suntha said. "But when you move to health care executive roles, I think scale takes on a whole new meaning."
Suntha was motivated by the opportunity to foster health at the community, state and even national level while still satisfying his initial goal of "improving the human condition, which is what we describe the mission of medicine to be," he said. In conversations with Newsweek, other physician executives described feeling similar pulls.
Medical doctors like Suntha have historically held seats in health system conference rooms. But the MD executives of the past tended toward physician-specific roles, becoming vice presidents of medical affairs, chief clinical officers and chief medical officers.
The tides are turning, according to Linda Komnick, managing partner in the physician integration and leadership practice at executive search and advisory firm WittKieffer. Doctors have become sought-after candidates for health systems' helms—when health systems call upon the firm for executive search services, they increasingly ask for a physician in the slate.
"What we're seeing is more and more physicians making their way into the CEO role, the president role of hospitals and health systems," Komnick told Newsweek. "Over the years, they have become much more involved in strategy and have a seat at that table."
Why More Docs Are Steering the Ship
Health systems' priorities are changing, and they demand new skill sets at the top, according to Komnick. COVID-19 illuminated glaring issues in the industry, from high costs to low efficiency. Organizations recognized the need for care transformation and leaned into new strategies. During the pandemic, private capital investments in value-based care companies more than quadrupled while new hospital construction stalled, McKinsey reported. Telehealth advanced, bringing new answers—and raising new questions.
A new era of care delivery is upon us, docs told Newsweek. Who better to chart it than the very physicians who provide that care?
Dr. Steven Kalkanis, a neurological surgeon-turned-CEO, told Newsweek his experiences as a physician have shaped his understanding of forthcoming delivery models like value-based care. Kalkanis is the executive vice president of Henry Ford Health and CEO of both its 877-bed flagship hospital and 1,900-physician medical group.
"I don't see how you can make this about value-based care without the care provider, because what value-based care really is trying to optimize is the patient outcome," Kalkanis said. "And so you have to have someone who is trained in the delivery of health and in disease entity."
Physicians are also uniquely poised to handle workforce issues, according to Dr. Charles Barbera, president and CEO of the 697-bed Reading Hospital in West Reading, Pennsylvania. He began his medical career as an emergency medicine physician, working in Reading Hospital's 120-room emergency department—the busiest in Pennsylvania.
Barbera assumed the hospital's top seat 28 years later, in early 2022, as health systems across the country struggled to maintain their nurse and physician workforces. He recalls that leadership made "a conscious decision" to appoint a CEO with a clinical background.
That background has been useful indeed, Barbera told Newsweek. The way things appear on paper is not always the way things are on the ground. Between his MD and his MBA (like Suntha, he went back for a business degree after medical school), Barbera can read between the lines and communicate across divides. He's versed in both clinician speak and C-suite speak, and has "the ability to translate two almost completely different languages so that people understand what the objectives are," he said.
"The most refreshing thing that I learned is that we all have the same goals—the medical staff, the nursing staff, the administration and the community all have the same goals, and that is to be the best health care provider that we can possibly be," Barbera said. "There's no one here in this community or that's employed here that doesn't believe in that."
Two 'Strong Centers of Gravity'
But a shared mission doesn't always equate to complete understanding. Administrators can't fully understand the barriers clinicians face, like equipment and staffing shortages. Clinicians can't fully understand the barriers administrators face, like financial constraints and government regulation.
"Fortunately in my role, I can see both because I'm in both," said Barbera, who still works in the emergency room every other Thursday.
Even with one foot in the clinic, it can be challenging to balance clinical needs with strategic, financial and operational ones. A recent WittKieffer study found that 60 percent of physician CEOs pursued further academic qualifications beyond their MDs, with more than half returning for an MBA.
Yet coursework doesn't solve for every variable—especially those involving other people. A separate WittKieffer survey of 50 physician leaders catalogued more than a dozen struggles that accompany the transition. When asked about the most significant challenges they faced moving into a C-suite role, 62 percent of respondents said they struggled to navigate organizational dynamics and politics. They were surprised by the loneliness they felt at the top (46 percent) and the importance of gaining allies and supporters to move projects along (36 percent).
For Barbera, the most shocking part of the CEO role was how long it took to cut through the red tape and get things done—even if everyone was on board.
Barbera also became more self-aware, he said. When he took the top job, people began to take notice of his day-to-day: where he parked, what he wore, what he ate for lunch. He watched himself more closely, too, conscious of each decision's "downstream effects."
"What I say may have an effect on people that is completely lost on me," Barbera said. "There are 7,000 people that work here, and my setting the tone is just so important for the culture and tone of this hospital."
As for Suntha, he described feeling two "strong centers of gravity" pulling on the CEO seat: the mission and the financial sustainability.
"For my clinical colleagues who step into these [leadership] roles, I think understanding the gravitational pull of those two centers is critical, and how you set that balance is equally important," Suntha said. "Depending which stakeholder group you're engaging, they're looking to understand, in my case, 'Is this physician only thinking through a clinical lens?' Or my clinical colleagues will look and say, 'Is this physician who decided to become an executive really thinking of medicine only as business?'"
In the early days of his tenure, Suntha recalls working to define his authentic voice as a leader, a tenor that could engage dueling spheres. He drew on his doctor days to do so.
"The foundational relationship that I would have with a patient was based on mutual trust, which allowed me to deliver care," he said. "The power of the voice as the CEO, and the influence both internally and externally, is still predicated on that foundational concept of trust."
Remembering Roots
In the spring of 2023, the Harris Poll surveyed more than 2,500 U.S. adults on their experience as patients in the U.S. health care system. More than half of respondents graded the system a C or below, complaining care is unaffordable and alleging the industry is too focused on profit.
However, three-quarters of respondents said providers work with them to improve their health, and two-thirds said their health would improve if they regularly worked with a trusted provider. The results nodded to an idea that's been brewing for a decade: Americans are mistrustful of capital-H-C "Health Care," but oftentimes trust in their own doctors.
As health systems battle high costs and low reimbursements, it's important for executives to speak fluent business. But they must be diligent about leaving the ivory tower, MD-CEOs told Newsweek: They have to keep the community at the core.
Physicians aren't the only executives who prioritize patients, Kalkanis clarified—but they've been uniquely acquainted with the health system's mission.
"For physicians, I think we do have a special experience when you go through training and especially residency, and you take calls in the middle of the night, and you see people at their most vulnerable," he said. "That somehow gets ingrained into our own professional DNA and helps inform leadership decisions when it comes to putting yourself in that moment."
Kalkanis believes that the medical and business worlds can be reconciled, that it doesn't have to be a "zero-sum game." His philosophy is that if you do right by patients, more patients will come to the facility, more people will want to work there, more collaborators will come and more government leaders will want to invest.
"By keeping [patients] at the forefront, some of the business challenges kind of go away because you're creating much more investment, and you're enriching the institution," Kalkanis said.
As for Suntha, when asked how he sees his own identity, he didn't hesitate: "I view myself as a physician, first and foremost."
