Healthcare has never needed strong, innovative leadership more urgently, but many of the people best equipped to provide it have never been more hesitant to raise their hands.
That’s one of the reasons I joined Oxeon as a partner about a month ago. In every organization, the team is everything, and finding the right executive leadership is becoming increasingly difficult. But that’s what we do.
We’ve hit a critical juncture in healthcare, a time when leadership is needed more than ever. We need the best leaders to make an impact on this industry and, therefore, on the millions of people who rely on the U.S. healthcare system. Of course, that depends almost entirely on the quality of leadership at the forefront. Healthcare is all about people. The stakes are high. The industry demands a level of sacrificial, empathetic leadership that may be impressive in other industries, but in healthcare? Table stakes.
The organizations that will navigate this moment successfully are the ones that stop treating executive search as a transaction and start treating it as what it actually is: a long-term partnership between an organization, a leader, and a firm that understands both well enough to make the match work for the long haul.
Right now, the healthcare system demands the best talent we can find, and often great talent from outside of the industry to infuse new thinking and fresh ideas. But many leaders are questioning whether they want to make the sacrifices necessary to lead.
The tension between the industry’s needs and the pool of available executive talent sits at the center of a shift that is currently playing out across boardrooms and C-suites nationwide. On one side, there is an industry undergoing simultaneous disruption from AI, consolidation, value-based care, workforce shortages, and shifting regulation, all of which demand seasoned, battle-tested executives who can navigate ambiguity without a playbook. Margin pressures are more intense than ever before. On the other side? Evidence is mounting, higher and higher, that the executives most qualified to lead through that ambiguity are increasingly deciding the top job isn't worth the required sacrifices.
A recent Bloomberg analysis captured the trend bluntly: more high-performing executives are turning down the CEO seat altogether, viewing it less as the pinnacle of a career and more as an unmanageable burden. Young professionals increasingly say they do not want to be a CEO, now or ever. The reasons cited (relentless crises, a public that holds the lowest trust for business they’ve held in two decades, and the expectation that leaders arbitrate every cultural and political flashpoint in real time) aren't unique to healthcare. However, they land with particular force in an industry where the stakes are measured in community trust, patient outcomes, organizational survival, and lives saved… not just monthly performance or quarterly earnings.
Healthcare's leadership churn is no longer a slow-moving trend; it's accelerating. Hospital CEO turnover rose 32% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Nearly 60% of hospital CEOs report at least one unfilled senior executive position on their team. Average tenure for hospital executives has fallen to just 3.8 years, down from a much longer standard a decade ago - five years in 2016 and 12 years a decade before that. Across the broader economy, 2025 saw a record 446 CEO exits at publicly traded companies, the highest annual total ever recorded.
The causes compound one another. Long-tenured executives who delayed retirement through the pandemic and years of political and economic uncertainty are now stepping down in greater numbers, and worse, all at once. Health systems, payers, biopharma companies, and digital health platforms are all competing for a shrinking pool of leaders capable of managing operational, financial, regulatory, and technological complexity simultaneously. Plus, the job itself has changed. Today's healthcare executive is expected to be a clinical translator, a technology strategist, a political diplomat, a cultural navigator, and a crisis communicator, often within the same hour, if not the same day.
At the same time, boards have grown far less tolerant of a "good enough" hire. What was once a search market (cast a wide net, find someone credentialed and available) has become a selection market, where precise fit, judgment, and demonstrated impact matter more than pedigree alone. Healthcare organizations aren't just short on executive leaders; they're short on the right leaders, vetted and matched with the kind of care a consequential role demands. That gets even tougher when the pool of available candidates shrinks.
When qualified executive leaders hesitate to jump in (or stay in) the arena, we have a real problem.
Layer onto that the dynamics Bloomberg and others have documented among executives more broadly, and the shortage starts to make sense. Leaders who have earned the right to run an organization increasingly view the top seat as an unforgiving one. Constant public scrutiny provides no room for error, a 24/7 news and social cycle turns every decision into a referendum, and the expectation to take a public position on divisive social and political issues creates an untenable, no-win proposition regardless of what decisions are made. All healthcare organizations manufacture crises on a daily basis, and hospitals and health systems do this on steroids. Add in the isolation of sitting as the single point of accountability, the erosion of any boundary between professional and personal life, and compensation that increasingly fails to offset the toll, and it's little wonder that many of the most capable executives are choosing smaller, less exposed roles, or even stepping away from the C-suite path altogether.
For healthcare organizations, this is more than an abstract leadership-pipeline problem. It's a direct threat to the pace of innovation, the stability of care delivery, and the trust that patients and communities place in the institutions that serve them. The industry cannot afford to lose its best operators to burnout, nor can it afford to settle for leaders who aren't equipped for the moment.
Matching the right executive with the right opportunity is a key way executive search helps with this problem. Supporting the organization and the leader during the search process, as well as during critical onboarding, is often the difference between long-term success and short-term turnover.
This is precisely the gap Oxeon is working to close.
After 17 years as a CEO and founder, I bring a perspective most executive search leaders don't have: I’ve been in the seat myself. As the founder of ReviveHealth and later co-founder and CEO of Unlock Health, I built and led healthcare marketing and consulting organizations through growth, private equity partnership, and leadership transitions, including my own move from CEO to board member (twice). That firsthand experience of what leadership roles actually demand and what makes them sustainable rather than corrosive informs how I now help other healthcare leaders and organizations find each other.
Oxeon, the healthcare executive search and investment firm where I now work as a partner, was built on a premise that runs counter to how executive search has traditionally worked. Rather than treating placements as one-off transactions, Oxeon invests in both the people and the companies it serves, at times taking ownership stakes alongside the leaders it places and staying engaged well beyond the offer letter when it makes sense. Founded in 2011, the firm has placed 1,300 leaders across health systems, payers, outpatient providers, healthcare IT companies, medical device, and digital health transformation.
The leadership team at Oxeon brings a combined 100-plus years of operating experience among our own search team and a client base spanning private equity-backed, venture-backed, and large nonprofit and publicly traded organizations. Three of every four Oxeon searches come from repeat clients, a signal that the relationships we build last.
The Oxeon model matters because the shortage healthcare faces isn't just a numbers problem, it's also a fit problem. Placing another credentialed executive into a role that will grind them down within eighteen months doesn't solve anything; it just moves the turnover statistic forward a year. What organizations actually need is leadership matched with enough precision and honesty that the person in the seat can be effective and sustain themselves in it. They need leaders who are set up to lead authentically rather than perform a version of leadership dictated by public pressure.
That's the piece too often missing from the conversation about the CEO shortage. It isn't only about finding people willing to take the job, it's about finding people who can do the job in a way that's true to who they are inside organizations that will let them lead. We spend as much time understanding an executive's values, working style, and what "success" looks like for them as we do evaluating a résumé, because a leader who has to abandon their authentic instincts to survive the role is a leader who won't last in it, no matter how qualified they were on paper.
Healthcare's leadership shortage won’t resolve itself, and the pressures discouraging talented executives from taking the top jobs aren't going away either. Yet the organizations that win in the market are those that stop treating executive search as a transaction and start treating it as what it actually is: a long-term partnership between an organization, a leader, and a firm that understands both well enough to make the match work for the long haul. That’s what I’m here for. Let's talk.
