Chief Medical Officer | Clinical Strategy, Growth & Transformation

Job Description

Job Description

The data shows the opportunity. We need the physician executive who can explain it - and build the clinical model around it.

A growing community health organization in the Southeast is exploring the addition of a Chief Medical Officer to help shape the next stage of its clinical strategy.

The organization has become increasingly sophisticated in understanding the economics of its clinical enterprise — combining provider, patient, pharmacy, reimbursement, and operational data to identify where significant opportunities exist.

Now it needs the physician executive who can connect those insights to what is actually happening in the exam room.

TWO PHYSICIANS. SIMILAR NUMBERS. VERY DIFFERENT RESULTS.

Consider two primary-care physicians working in similar settings.

They see comparable patient volumes. Their payer mix looks similar. Their patient populations appear broadly comparable. By traditional productivity measures, they might appear to be performing at roughly the same level.

Yet the downstream economic opportunity associated with their practices can differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Why?

That is one of the central questions the next CMO will help answer.

Perhaps one physician is more comfortable managing complex chronic disease while another refers much of that care externally. Perhaps prescribing patterns differ. Perhaps one provides more comprehensive care. Or perhaps there are meaningful differences in patient acuity, panel composition, workflow, clinical confidence, continuity, or support that the existing analysis has not yet captured.

The organization does not want to assume the answer. It wants a clinical leader capable of investigating it.

The CMO will help determine:

• What is actually driving meaningful variation among providers?
• Which differences reflect stronger clinical practice and should be replicated?
• Where is care being referred elsewhere that could appropriately remain within primary care?
• What do prescribing and referral patterns reveal about how comprehensively patients are being managed?
• Where do physicians need better tools, workflows, education, or support?
• Where should expectations and accountability change?

The organization already has people capable of finding the numbers.

It needs the physician executive who can determine what those numbers mean - and what to do next.

BUILD A BETTER CLINICAL MODEL

Leadership does not believe physician performance can be understood solely through visits per day.

There may be situations where spending more time managing a medically complex patient creates greater overall value than adding another visit — particularly if it results in better chronic-disease management, stronger continuity, fewer unnecessary referrals, better medication adherence, and more coordinated care.

That thinking becomes particularly powerful when combined with pharmacy.

Partner with a visionary Pharmacy leader

Pharmacy is already one of the organization’s most strategically important clinical functions, led by an executive who brings a growth-oriented, highly analytical approach to the service line.

The pharmacy team is advancing a more sophisticated model around operations, provider partnership, patient engagement, and the economic value associated with different prescriptions and patient populations. That work has revealed an important reality: a relatively small portion of patients and prescriptions can represent a disproportionate share of the available opportunity.

The CMO will become the clinical counterpart to that work.

Together, medical and pharmacy leadership will help answer questions such as:

• Which patient populations would benefit from a more comprehensive model of care?
• Which chronic conditions should the organization become exceptionally good at managing?
• How should physicians and pharmacy work together around those patients?
• Where is care leaving the organization that could appropriately remain within a more integrated model?
• Can better care, stronger patient engagement, and better economics reinforce one another?
• What support would allow physicians to manage greater clinical complexity successfully?

The opportunity is not simply to increase pharmacy utilization. It is to understand how physician practice, chronic-disease management, prescribing, referrals, and patient engagement fit together — and then build a more integrated clinical model around what the data reveals.

The goal is high expectations in an environment designed to help physicians meet them.

BUILD WHAT COMES NEXT

The opportunity extends beyond improving the existing primary-care model.

Leadership wants to selectively expand specialty services where patient need and the organization's structural advantages create a compelling clinical and economic case.

The CMO will help determine:

• Which specialties make sense to bring in-house?
• Where is clinically appropriate care unnecessarily leaving the organization?
• Which patient populations could benefit from new integrated programs?
• What successful models elsewhere are worth adapting?
• How can new services be built in a way that is sustainable and scalable?

This is an organization willing to question the traditional community-health playbook. Leadership believes financial sustainability and mission are not opposing ideas: building stronger clinical models can create the resources to serve more patients and reinvest in better care.

The CMO will have meaningful latitude to help decide what those models should be.

THE ENVIRONMENT

The executive philosophy is straightforward:

Understand the opportunity. Develop the strategy. Explain what you need. Execute. Measure the result. Adjust.

The organization offers:

• High expectations paired with significant autonomy.
• A deeply analytical, data-driven executive team.
• A willingness to invest when the clinical and business case is compelling.
• Freedom to challenge conventional assumptions and test new ideas.
• An intentional focus on the priorities that materially move the organization forward rather than administrative busywork.

This is an environment for a physician executive who wants to build , not simply maintain.

THE PHYSICIAN EXECUTIVE WE ARE SEEKING

The strongest candidate will have significant physician-leadership experience in a complex ambulatory environment and a demonstrated ability to connect clinical decisions with broader organizational performance.

Particularly relevant experience includes:

• Using data to investigate and improve variation in physician practice.
• Improving comprehensive primary care or chronic-disease management.
• Changing physician behavior while maintaining credibility and engagement.
• Building or expanding clinical programs or service lines.
• Partnering effectively with finance, operations, pharmacy, and technology.
• Improving physician workflows while maintaining meaningful accountability.
• Operating with autonomy and turning broad strategic objectives into action.

Federally Qualified Health Center or community-health experience may be valuable, but it is not the defining qualification. The organization is also interested in sophisticated physician leaders from value-based care, population health, medical groups, and other integrated ambulatory environments who can bring ideas that have worked elsewhere.

WHY CONSIDER IT?

Many CMO positions ask an accomplished physician executive to manage what already exists.

This one presents a different challenge:

Help the organization understand why some clinical models create dramatically more value than others. Determine what great looks like. Then build it.

For the physician executive whose instinct is to see unexplained variation, ask why , and start figuring out the answer, this could be an unusually compelling opportunity.

Confidential inquiries are welcomed.