When Omar Lateef, DO, retires as president and CEO of Chicago-based Rush University System for Health in June 2027, he plans to return to clinical practice and expand his work in community and public health.
The patient care and community focus is a natural extension of his work as CEO over the past several years.
Dr. Lateef has been with Rush for nearly 25 years. After completing a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellowship at Rush University Medical Center in 2005, he joined the faculty and later served as chief medical officer. He was named president and CEO of Rush University Medical Center in 2019, president of the system in 2021 and CEO in 2022. The board of directors will launch a national search for his successor in early fall 2026.
A year out from his retirement, Dr. Lateef said he does not have a definitive plan for what his public health work will look like. What he does know is that years leading a major academic medical system changed how he sees the relationship between medicine and the broader forces that shape it.
“What I learned over the last 6 1/2 six-and-a-half years as being CEO is that you can’t separate public policy and public health,” he told Becker’s. “I want to get more involved and advocate for healthcare at large.”
That impulse connects directly to work Dr. Lateef has championed during his tenure — specifically the effort to close the gap in life expectancy between Chicago’s Loop and its West Side, a disparity that research has shown can span more than a decade within a short drive. He credited David Ansell, MD, and Ayesha Jaco and their colleagues at West Side United with driving early measurable progress through community partnerships, and said watching that work has sharpened his appetite to see whether the model can scale.
“I’m watching these amazing people do this work, and it’s really fed a desire to see if there’s a way to scale that in other communities,” he said. “I don’t have a plan made right now, but I’d love in the future to work with brilliant people and help build those plans.”
Reflecting on what drove Rush’s rise in national quality rankings during his tenure, Dr. Lateef credited the organization as a whole, and traced the results to a single organizing principle.
“Quality and patient care has to be at the heart of it when you’re delivering healthcare, and if that is your true north, quality rankings will improve, and actual patient quality and patient experience will improve,” he said.
His clinical background as a pulmonologist who spent years at the bedside before moving into leadership shaped how he understood that standard and what it cost to fall short of it.
“The journey of being a CEO was more humbling every day than it was the day before,” he said. “Being a clinician has helped me understand the incredible challenges clinicians on the front line and nurses on the front line have every day. It creates an intense desire to try to make it better. There’s a lot of frustration when you’re a leader and you can’t, and there’s a lot of happiness when you could help contribute to bringing a little more joy in people’s work, and if you can help get better outcomes.”
On what Rush needs in its next leader, Dr. Lateef pointed to continuity of mission, the same community-focused North Star that he said has defined the organization for two decades and that he inherited rather than invented.
“I think the leader that follows me would hopefully embrace the same mission, vision, and values that’s defined Rush for the last two decades, which is to improve the health of our community, and that comes from our board as well,” he said.
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