Leadership
Executive Takes: Dr. John Neil
Perspectives on healthcare from a very busy Chief Physician Executive and Network Strategy Officer for HonorHealth.
March 26, 2026
Dr. John Neil is the EVP, Chief Physician Executive and Network Strategy Officer for Honor Health.
Time on the Job: 11 years, during which HonorHealth has grown almost threefold, and added a medical school affiliation.
Prior Role: Interventional radiologist
Current Project with Korn Ferry: “We are collaborating on what our executive structure looks like for the next ten years, because we’ve somewhat outgrown ours. Once we get that in place, we’ll move on to N2 and N3, and the additional levels.”
Ten Takes From Dr. Neil
Favorite Saying: “The only real strategy we have is people, and if we don’t get that part right, the rest doesn’t matter.”
How to Communicate with Physicians: “We have an obligation to provide the ‘why’ to our physicians and nurses when a request can’t be fulfilled. They’re important people who deserve an explanation, and if you have that level of transparency and are willing to put in the time to have those communications, the conversations become less difficult and less frequent, because people develop a collective understanding.”
What’s Great About Being a Clinician: “Nobody gets to interact in a humanistic way with as many people as we do. We’re blessed to have these jobs, and we should figure out how to do it better. That’s how I think about it.”
Brain Space is Currently Dominated By: “First, how do we recruit, grow and retain the clinical workforce, and all the folks that support them, when the burnout rate within many of those sectors is in the range of 40–50%. Second, most of the growth and community need is in nonhospital settings: medical groups, ambulatory surgery, outpatient imaging, outpatient physical therapy—which have not historically been the profitable parts of our business. It’s exactly what we should be doing, but the economics are really difficult.”
Partial Solution to Clinician Shortages: “The system is designed so that only certain people can do certain things. That’s a false construct. We can redefine role descriptions so that different people can do things safely and appropriately.”
Very Excited About: Robotic surgery advancements. “There are hurdles—regulatory, financial, reimbursement—but if we get it right, the computing abilities, augmented by AI, are going to advance the standard capabilities that our surgeons are able to do using robotic technology.”
The Difference Between Physician and Business Executives: “Physicians have usually had frontline life-and-death relationships with patients, and so the realities of staffing levels, staffing competency, facility preparedness and necessary supplies resonate differently for us, because we understand at a visceral level the consequences of when those things aren’t right.
Business executives understand, at a much more global level, the reality of economic and financial constraints. Sometimes that means that not everybody gets everything they want. Those are hard decisions, which fundamentally are always going to be at odds, to some extent, with how it feels on the front lines.”
Necessary Conversations with Physicians: “When physicians ask for things, there are going to be times when they are told, ‘No.’ I get it—I’ve taken care of patients at 3am who, if I didn’t have the right technology and nursing staff, were going to die. We do everything we can to make sure those fundamental things are there.”
The Mindshift that Healthcare Needs: “It’s okay if technology makes us more efficient and ultimately leads to fewer jobs. We obviously need to be empathetic and very thoughtful, but there’s also the reality that almost half the health systems in the country are running a negative operating margin, and that’s not sustainable. We all deal with 15–20% turnovers, so we don’t need to fire people. But especially in not-for-profit healthcare, there’s a mindset that we’re a jobs program, and ‘Oh geez, we can’t let anybody lose a job.’”
Surprising Perspective: “One wicked problem of healthcare is that the current economic model isn’t long-term sustainable. And I think that’s super exciting. That’s why this industry should attract smart, motivated people who are focused on how we can deliver more care to more people for the same or less cost. I find the wicked problems to be very exciting.”
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