Christopher Newman, President and CEO of Mary Washington Healthcare

Summary

Podcast Summary: Becker’s Healthcare Podcast

Guest: Dr. Christopher Newman, President and CEO of Mary Washington Healthcare
Host: Laura Deardo
Date: January 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Christopher Newman, President and CEO of Mary Washington Healthcare, discussing his transition into the CEO role and the key initiatives reshaping his organization. Major topics include cultural transformation, workforce shortages, ambitions to become an academic health system, and new service lines to meet a rapidly growing community’s needs.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Newman’s Background and Transition to CEO

• Internal Medicine Physician trained at Georgetown University.
• Career journey from primary care in rural Illinois to CMO and COO roles in large systems.
• Joined Mary Washington Healthcare in 2019 and was named CEO in March 2025.
• On the transition:
  Quote: “I underestimated the differences in the role and how really big the CEO role can be…it’s definitely much more external as well.” (02:16)

2. Cultural Transformation & Organizational Morale

• Cultural revitalization post-pandemic as a foremost initiative.
• Focused on reconnecting staff with the mission and elevating morale.
• Addressed the challenge of transactional work culture that emerged during the pandemic and remote work era.
• Results:
  • Certified as Great Place to Work for the 5th consecutive year
  • Recognized as a Forbes Top 200 Midsize Employer
  • 9% year-over-year increase in “faith in leadership” on internal surveys
    Quote: "That cultural transformation has to happen at the top…to create authentic relationships between the leadership team as well as to our frontline." (04:58)

3. Major Priorities: Workforce and Physician Shortages

• Acute provider shortage: ranks in 2nd percentile nationwide for physicians per capita.
• Rapid regional population growth exacerbates the shortfall.
• Massive effort to build a sustainable workforce pipeline.
• Initiatives include partnerships with local colleges, building graduate medical education programs, and plans for a regional medical school.
• Quote: “We have 1,000 physicians…but we need 2,000. We just can’t recruit fast enough to keep on top of it.” (06:47)
• Building new specialty residencies in cardiology, gastroenterology, psychiatry, rheumatology, anesthesia, general surgery, and primary care.

4. Transitioning to an Academic Health System

• Ambition to elevate from community to academic system.
• Partnership with University of Mary Washington to co-create a regional medical school.
• Public–private partnership model, seeking state support and philanthropic funding to keep tuition accessible.
• Emphasis on retaining local med students and residents in the region to address ongoing physician shortfalls.
• Quote: “We’re really looking to create a pipeline here in the Commonwealth for the Commonwealth.” (10:43)

5. Financial Challenges and Sustainability

• Loss of 340B status and other reimbursement changes bring financial strain.
• Anticipation of impacts from potential Medicaid disenrollment and rising contract labor costs.
• Balancing financial pressures, growth, and cultural changes is an ongoing challenge.
• Quote: “That’s hard work to do as you are also trying to increase the morale… and grow. So it’s a challenge to do all three simultaneously.” (12:30)

6. Building and Aligning the Leadership Team

• Several long-term C-suite members retired as Dr. Newman became CEO, requiring the formation of a largely new executive team.
• He prioritized alignment around vision and mission when selecting new leaders.
• Communication and cascading vision throughout the organization are critical, especially as clinical education responsibilities expand for all staff.
• Quote: “Communication is big. You can’t just say something once…getting everybody excited about the vision…is really a big part of what I do every day.” (14:00)

7. Growth Opportunities and Service Expansion

• Mary Washington Healthcare’s service area population has grown to over 500,000.
• New investments in advanced service lines: recently launched neurology/thrombectomy program, recruiting neurosurgeons, building capacity for tertiary/quaternary care.
• Focus on expanding ambulatory sites and primary care access in response to community’s growth.
• Quote: “We’re really being able to advance the sophistication of care so that people don’t have to leave this community to get care.” (15:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the responsibility of healthcare workers:
  “I have thousands of our associates and caregivers…working day and night through the holidays. There’s a challenge, but it’s also a great privilege to do the work that we do.” (04:07)

• On new ventures:
  “We are working through processes with our local and state officials on creating a medical school here regionally.” (07:43)

• On organizational transformation:
  “Transitioning from a community health system to an academic health system is change for everybody…all of our caregivers are now having to do some education.” (14:30)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic / Quote | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:00 | Dr. Newman’s introduction and career path | | 02:16 | Differences in CEO vs. COO role | | 03:04 | Cultural transformation initiative and results | | 06:13 | Workforce shortages—Mary Washington ranks in the 2nd percentile for physicians per capita | | 07:46 | Plans and partnerships to build a medical school and expand clinical education programs | | 11:44 | Financial challenges—loss of 340B, contract labor and Medicaid reimbursement issues | | 13:22 | Leadership team rebuilding, communication, and vision cascade | | 15:13 | Opportunities for growth—tertiary/quaternary care expansion and ambulatory sites |

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Conclusion

Dr. Newman’s episode is a candid look at the complexities and opportunities in today’s healthcare landscape. From stewarding culture and morale, navigating acute workforce shortages, pivoting toward academic medicine, and facing financial headwinds, Mary Washington Healthcare’s journey under Dr. Newman’s leadership offers valuable insights for health system leaders across the country.

Transcript

[A]

This is where healthcare leadership comes together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13th through the 16th. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former President George W. Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit Beckershospitalreview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.

[B]

This is Laura Deardo with the Beckers Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Christopher Newman, President and Chief Executive Officer at Mary Washington Healthcare. Dr. Newman, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

[C]

Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here.

[B]

Fantastic. Now, I'm excited to have you here because I know there's so much happening in healthcare today and particularly I'm looking forward to learning more about Mary Washington Healthcare. But before we dive in, can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?

[C]

Yeah. I'm an internal medicine physician. I went to medical school and trained at Georgetown University in Nation's Capital. I started off my career as a small town primary care physician in rural Southern Illinois. Did that for many years. It was really a very rewarding part of my career. Then I moved east working at the Lehigh Valley Health Network. Then got my MBA at University of Virginia and started moving into administrative roles, starting off as a Chief Medical Officer within the Penn State Health System. And I joined Mary Washington in 2019 in a dual role as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Medical Officer of the health system. And then our prior CEO got an exciting opportunity in California this year and that opened up the role for me. And I've been in the role of CEO since March of this year. So, new to the CEO chair.

[B]

Well, fantastic. And congratulations on taking that role. I know it's a huge responsibility, especially given how dynamic the healthcare space has been today. What's your first? I don't know. I guess eight, nine months been like or so?

[C]

Yeah, it's definitely been very challenging. And Talking to other CEOs, I don't know that anything can quite prepare you for the role. Being an internal candidate and having been here for a number of years in the COO role, I think I underestimated the differences in the role and how really big the CEO role can be. It's definitely much more external as well. So there's a lot more external components to it. And really everybody looks to you for all the answers and for the direction of the organization. So it's really been interesting.

[B]

I can imagine so. Well, you know, in thinking about the last year, what was one of the most important initiatives you led, what did you do and what were the results?

[C]

Yeah, so we had many, many big initiatives last year, but one of the ones that, you know, with me coming into the role was really cultural transformation. You know, we, we had been on a journey to really not only improve our patient experience, but also improve the experience of all our associates and workforce. And I think, you know, really coming out pandemic, I saw this pretty profoundly, not just in healthcare, but all industries really, that move to a transactional relationship with work. And you know, I think remote work kind of maybe accelerated some of that. But, you know, and even in healthcare, you see people moving away from truly the purpose it is of what we do and honestly the privilege of what we do in healthcare. So really using the opportunity to our tie our teams back into mission, make sure our teams feel supported, often in some very, very difficult and challenging roles that they have in healthcare, and really just elevate the morale and the experience of the whole organization. And really that cultural transformation has to happen at the top and then really cascades through our whole leadership team. And as we head into sort of the holidays here, it's not lost on me that as many, many people are home with their families and able to decom. I literally have thousands of our associates and caregivers and physicians who will be working day and night through the holidays caring for our community. There's a challenge, but it's also a great responsibility and a great privilege to be able to do the work that we do. From the result front, pleased to say this year we've been certified as a great place to work. For the fifth year consecutively, for the first time, we were recognized by Forbes as a top 200 midsize employer in the US and that's of course all industries, so that, you know, it's really nice to get that recognition. Some of our internal surveys showed that we had an increased faith in leadership of 9% year over year. So that's a huge gain in a year. But really, you know, those are the. Some of the external, but I'm starting to feel it as I round walk around. You can really see it in the expressions and the demeanor of our, of our staff as I, as I hope we've removed the distance between leadership and our bedside caregivers and really worked hard to create authentic relationships between the leadership team as well as to our frontline.

[B]

Staff that's really cool to hear. And I know it's not easy to do to go through some of those cultural transformations especially and trying to figure out how you can elevate that morale and find those meaning, find the why in the things that the team is doing on a daily basis, especially on the front line, is just such critical work. When you're looking into the next year or so, what are the big priorities and headwinds that you're focused on?

[C]

Yeah, so my biggest priority is really a workforce. I know everybody across the nation is struggling with workforce. There just aren't enough licensed healthcare professionals to really care for our communities. But my particular community is challenged even more than most. When we look at certain metrics like physicians per capita, physicians per 100,000 population in our market, we rank in just the second percentile in the nation in that metric to the bad meaning we have less than half the physicians per 100,000 than an average community. And the average community is short on healthcare providers. And it's only compounded by the rapid population growth that we're seeing in our region. I think a lot of people think about a physician shortage area as maybe a rural county that needs five docs and only has one. We have 1,000 physicians, 100 medical staff, but we need 2,000. We have a large region here that's growing between Washington D.C. and Richmond, right on the 95 corridor. But we just can't recruit fast enough to keep on top of it. So we are working very, very hard on all sorts of pipelines for all sorts of licensed healthcare professional. And we're transitioning from a community healthcare system, hopefully to an academic healthcare system so that we can really become a destination for clinical education here in the Commonwealth, Virginia. We have plans potentially of a medical school where we are working through processes with our local and state officials on creating a medical school here regionally. We are working with our local community colleges and four year university here on pipelines for other licensed health care professionals. And we launched graduate medical education for the first time in a large fashion about three years ago. And we are building out all sorts of specialties. Next year we have cardiology and gastroenterology and psychiatry and rheumatology. We're looking to start. We just did anesthesia and general surgery and primary care specialties. We're really looking to build out the full host of medical specialties to kind of create our own and create a sustainable pipeline for the future.

[B]

That's an amazing goal. And especially when you think about, you know, as you mentioned, bringing in additional providers to more of a rural setting is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. But then too, I know the health care, you know, professional landscape right now is just a very competitive space. And so I think it's really interesting to hear that you're looking at becoming an academic health system and looking at the medical school as well. What does it take to stand up? Something like that. I can imagine it's, you know, a lot of moving parts and takes a lot of planning. But also, you know, it seems like you're very execution oriented. So I'm curious, how did you, you know, decide to move forward with that and what does it take to really make that transition?

[C]

Yeah, it's. It definitely is a very heavy lift. Although we could do it by ourselves. We are lucky to have four year you a state university, University of Mary Washington right here in our community that's literally our campuses are adjacent and we are looking to do this as a public private partnership really to create a sustainable pipeline of physicians for our region. But as. As well as other areas that are challenged in the Commonwealth. So, you know, they, they've been a perfect partner to kind of help stand this up. There's a lot of discussions with state and local officials because there's many appro, including funding as well as licensing and approvals of this program. So we've spent a lot of time with a lot of communication with our elected officials so that they understand the need and can buy in to what we're trying to do here. Philanthropy will play a huge component as well. So we're really looking for wealthy individuals or people of means that really care about the community and healthcare to help contribute so that we can keep the tuition low enough that we can really attract patients, not patient students from our communities to really create this sustainable pipeline. Because people tend to be able to want to practice in the communities they grew up if they have the opportunity to go to medical school. Undergraduate residencies, there's a strong retention piece to that as well. So we're really looking to create a pipeline here in the Commonwealth for the Commonwealth. So we're trying to do something a little bit different than some of our other great institutions we have in the state that focus a lot on academics and research. In some of those areas, we are going to be really focused on clinical education for those that are really wanting to practice in our communities.

[B]

That's great to hear. Thank you so much for digging a little bit deeper there. Now I know a lot of exciting things ahead, but I'm curious what do you think the hardest thing you'll have to do in the coming year will be.

[C]

Well, on top of all the exciting cultural transformation and the academics and all that, we're also facing a lot of financial challenges as I think many health systems are, as our paramecs here locally has changed. We just lost 340B this year, so that has been certainly a challenge. And I know others in the Commonwealth are starting to talk about this as the big beautiful bill rolls in and there may be people disenrolled for Medicaid that could change some of the ratios and subsequently create challenges for them as well. And that's a very, very important financial piece. And then we're really struggling with cost of contract labor locums for physicians coverage. As I said, we are very short staffed for what our region needs. So we really have to look ahead with a lot of cost containment and continuous financial improvement as we look at the headwinds that our industry and our region have ahead. That's hard work to do as you are also trying to increase the morale and the cultural experience of our associates and grow. So it's a challenge to do all three simultaneously.

[B]

Absolutely. That is definitely a huge, huge challenge. But it seems like you've got a great foundation there. When you think about being able to do all of these things, how do you ensure that your leadership team is ready and you're prepared to tackle some of the challenges ahead?

[C]

Well, as I moved into my role, you know, we had several very, very long standing C suite members here at Mary Washington retire simultaneously. So I have an entire new team here at Mary Washington and I had the ability to select that team. So really being able to bring in people that share the vision and the mission that we were trying to accomplish here was definitely exciting. So I'm really lucky to have a fantastic. And I think they're all up to the task. And this is a team sport. We need a lot of different people from a lot of different disciplines to kind of bring these visions and these dreams to fruition and execute on them. So got a great team. Communication is big. You can't just say something once. And those messages need to be cascaded throughout the organization. As you can imagine, transitioning from a community health system to an academic health system is change for everybody because all of our caregivers are now having to do some education as well as they work with students and residents here that we already have within the health system. So really, everybody understanding the why behind the decisions we're making, getting everybody excited about the Vision and where the health system is going is really a big part of what I do every day.

[B]

I love that. I think, you know, it's definitely critical and great to see you've been able to compose that leadership team and can move forward as one voice. Now before we wrap up, where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth coming down the pipe?

[C]

Yeah, so we're, we're a little different I think than a lot of markets as well in that we're, we're growing, the population is growing so rapidly here and we are in a bit of a transformation. So we have a lot of opportunities ahead of us. And you know, my challenge is where to deploy capital, what to prioritize because we could do so many things here, but our immediate population has just tipped over 500,000. So we are now starting to stand up some higher tertiary and quaternary level services here at the health system we just launched for neurology and acute thrombectomy program. We're making a lot of investments in the neurosciences. We've recruited four new neurosurgeons to the health system. We're really being able to advance the sophistication of care so that people don't have to leave this community to get care. And often historically they've had to go to Washington D.C. or Richmond or others for those higher level care. So we're doing a lot of investments in more sophisticated care and more tertiary and quaternary level care, which is kind of exciting and then just a lot of the expansion that we to need to keep up with the growth of the community. So a lot of investment in ambulatory, new ambulatory sites, primary care practices, et cetera, so that we can make sure that we have access points for everyone.

[B]

Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense and it's just really helpful to know. Dr. Newman, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation, very inspiring and I look forward to connecting with you again soon and seeing you in April at our annual meeting. I know you'll be speaking on a panel and I'm sure we'll be digging deeper into some of the themes we talked about here, but just will be really excited to see you then and look forward to having a great, great meeting at that point too.

[C]

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Thank you.