2026 CPE Persona Report
The Health System CPE is Moving Fast. Your Pitch Needs to Keep Up.
The Chief Physician Executive sits at the intersection of clinical authority and executive accountability. Always a physician, almost always promoted from within, and reporting directly to the CEO, the CPE is responsible for clinical quality, service line integration, physician workforce strategy, and population health. In many systems, the old CMO role has been restructured, and the CPE now holds a scope that no single title fully captures.
Right now, CPEs are navigating a convergence of pressures: Medicaid reform, expired ACA subsidies, 340B scrutiny, and an AI landscape full of overlapping tools and fatigued vendors. They want partners who can demonstrate validated results with comparable physician groups, show a clear path from pilot to scale, and work under shared risk rather than transactional contracts.
The CPE persona research from The Health Management Academy gives commercial and strategy teams a clear picture of where these leaders are focused, where their challenges are, and how they make vendor decisions. Understanding this context is the difference between a meeting and a partnership.
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What You’ll Learn
Based on primary research with our leading health system CPEs, this brief covers the 27 priorities, pain points, and decision frameworks shaping every major clinical technology conversation in 2026, including:
The real number one priority for CPEs in 2026. AI strategy tops the list. Learn what CPEs actually mean by governance and what separates a credible AI partner from another tool in an already crowded stack.
Where the biggest improvement gaps are. Care at home, patient affordability, and workflow automation rank among the highest improvement opportunities relative to performance today — a meaningfully different list than stated strategic priorities, and a more useful one for commercial teams.
The five things every vendor must demonstrate. The CPE checklist for solution evaluation covers clinician-validated evidence, workflow integration, shared risk alignment, explainability, and rapid scale pathways — pulled directly from the research.
Access the full survey results across all 27 priority areas.
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About The Health Management Academy
Since 1998, The Health Management Academy has cultivated the premier membership-based community of healthcare’s most influential CXOs from top U.S. health systems, as well as decision makers from innovative industry companies.
We cultivate exceptional peer groups, providing original market insights, world-class leadership development programs, and novel member alliances to more than 2,000 health system senior executives and 200 industry organizations.
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Health System Executives
600+
Health System C-Suite Members
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Industry Members
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Years of Convening
