7 Chief Clinical Executives to Know

Chief clinical executives such as CMOs are focused on a range of issues, including quality, patient capacity, care variation, and high reliability.

This year, HealthLeaders interviewed more than a dozen new CMOs, chief physician executives, and chief clinical officers. Here are seven executives that are poised to make an impact in 2025:

1. Chris Frost, MD, senior vice president, CMO, and chief quality officer, Lifepoint Health

Frost was named senior vice president, CMO, and chief quality officer of Lifepoint in July. He has served in two other leadership roles at the Brentwood, Tennessee-based health system: chief medical officer of Lifepoint Communities and national medical director of hospital-based services. Frost is a member of the HealthLeaders CMO Exchange.

Frost says the core elements of promoting quality care include a leadership component, a process improvement component, and a culture of safety.

The leadership component includes the recognition of the importance of leadership in every aspect of the organization, according to Frost. It also includes engagement of all the quality stakeholders and an accountability process.

Frost says Lifepoint has a checklist of 10 critical components for performance improvement, including huddles that clinical care teams use to focus on clinical workflows, whiteboards at every clinical care unit to identify opportunities for improvement, and tracking data that demonstrate progress or regression.

The culture of safety at Lifepoint includes the engagement of patients and their families as well as fostering an environment where all team members experience psychological safety and have a voice in the safety process, according to Frost.

Chris Frost, MD is senior vice president, CMO, and chief quality officer of Lifepoint Health. Photo courtesy of Lifepoint Health.

2. Joseph Galante, MD, CMO, UC Davis Medical Center

Galante was named CMO of the Sacramento, California-based academic medical center in July. He had served as interim CMO for a year and was the hospital’s trauma medical director for many years.

Addressing patient capacity is one of his top challenges.

A unique element of the medical center's patient capacity crunch has been California's seismic compliance requirements, which prompted the closing of many beds, according to Galante.

"We have had to close 70 beds over the past year," he says. "By closing those beds, we had to find 70 new beds to open in different locations throughout the hospital."

UC Davis Medical Center has had to do more than open beds to address the facility's capacity challenge, Galante explains.

"You must apply the operations and workflows to be able to move patients more seamlessly and get them discharged," he says.

3. Cameron Mantor, MD, MHA, chief physician executive at OU Health and president of OU Health Partners

In September, Mantor was named chief physician executive at the Oklahoma City, Oklahoma-based academic health system and president of OU Health Partners, the health system's physician practice. He had been serving in the roles on an interim basis since January.

OU Health Partners is positioned for growth, and one of Mantor's primary responsibilities is to help manage the recruitment of new physicians. Oklahoma ranks low for the number of physicians per capita in the country for almost every primary care area as well as specialties.

One recruiting advantage for OU Health and OU Health Partners is the tripartite mission of the organization: education, research, and clinical care, according to Mantor.

"Our goal is to show physician recruits what we are looking to create, so they see what our vision is and hopefully that aligns with them," he says. "That tends to attract recruits. We have a great academic health center, with seven colleges on our campus, so we can attract physician recruits both from an education standpoint and a research standpoint."

4. Thomas McGinn, MD, MPH, senior executive vice president and chief physician executive officer, CommonSpirit Health

McGinn was appointed senior executive vice president and chief physician executive officer of the Chicago-based health system in September. He joined the health system in 2021 as executive vice president for physician enterprise.

McGinn says he is passionate about reducing clinical care variation to boost patient safety and quality.

"My background is in evidence-based medicine and looking at clinical standards," he says. "We have a national program that sets clinical standards."

According to McGinn, the key to success in setting clinical standards is to have clinicians drive the process.

"It is not a top-down approach," he says. "We put the standards in front of the clinicians, we give them some options, we have multiple group meetings, then the clinicians come to a consensus about the clinical standards."

5. Arthur Pancioli, MD, senior vice president and chief clinical officer, UC Health

Pancioli assumed the role of senior vice president and chief clinical officer at the Cincinnati-based academic health system in August. Prior to taking on his new position, he was chief transformation officer of the health system.

This year, UC Health launched an initiative to become a high reliability organization.

"Many healthcare organizations across the country have taken on the concept of high reliability," Pancioli says. "It is a well-studied science that is a methodology of improvement of an entire organization. We have just entered an engagement with a consultancy, and we are starting our journey to high reliability."

The first step in this process, he says, is assessment.

"The first thing you do is determine your current state and opportunities for improvement in high reliability, which is the pursuit of zero harm in a highly complex organization," Pancioli says.

6. Tipu Puri, MD, PhD, CMO, University of Chicago Medical Center

Puri was appointed CMO of the Chicago-based academic medical center in September. He joined UChicago Medicine as an internal medicine resident in 1999 and has held several physician leadership roles, most recently associate CMO.

To address health equity concerns, a health system or hospital must be inquisitive, according to Puri.

"It starts with asking questions about health equity," he says.

The next step is harnessing data, Puri explains.

"You need to have data that you can act on," he says. "Our data and analytics team has done a good job of creating an equity lens that we can use when we look at any of our data and break data down along multiple patient demographics, including race, gender, and Zip codes."

7. Scott Schissel, MD, PhD, CMO, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center

Schissel became CMO of the 665-bed academic medical center, which is operated by RWJBarnabas Health, in August. He had been CMO and vice president of medical affairs at Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital in Boston, where he also served as associate CMO and chief of medicine.

Like Pancioli, Schissel is focusing on high reliability, which he also pursued in Boston.

"We had a system of just culture, where patient care was examined from the perspective of systems improvement and accountability that goes beyond individual human error," he says.

Staff from all disciplines at the Boston-based hospital shared a vision of high reliability and worked collaboratively on care and quality goals, Schissel says.

"In addition, every decision we made in healthcare leadership placed the patient's best interest and safety at the center," he says. "Creating and maintaining this kind of culture is hard work, and it is a continuous process."

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