President, Inova Physician Enterprise

Acting Chief Executive Officer, Pediatric Specialists of Virginia
Associate Chair for Operations and Quality, Pediatric Neurosciences, Inova Health System
Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics, Uniformed Services University

Dissertation Title

Reported Clinical and Financial Performance of Hospitals with Physician CEOs Compared to Those With Nonphysician CEOs

Dissertation Abstract

Leaders impact organizational behavior and performance, and CEOs may have greater impact via numerous proposed mechanisms. Because of this, organizations expend considerable resources recruiting and selecting CEOs and may benefit from information suggesting a positive impact on organizational performance based upon measurable CEO characteristics. Little work has been done comparing the performance of hospitals with physician CEOs versus non-physician CEOs, in spite of the ease of identification of this characteristic and extant leadership theories suggesting a relationship between technical expertise and success in leading highly technical organizations. We compared multiple measures of reported clinical and financial performance and our linear regression model using numerous hospital and environmental control variables demonstrated no statistically significant differences between the two groups in catheter based line infections, acute myocardial infarction (AMI) mortality, pneumonia readmission rates, return on assets, or operating margin. The 30-day AMI mortality rate showed a positive statistically significant difference in bivariate analysis (p-value<0.001), but the effect was nullified in the multivariable regression analysis.