Jonathan W. Curtright, MBA, MHA, stepped into the president and CEO role at Oklahoma City-based OU Health on July 1, bringing more than three decades of healthcare leadership experience and an insider’s perspective after helping lead the academic health system’s transformation as COO over the past three years.
Mr. Curtright joined OU Health in 2022 after being recruited by his predecessor, Rick Lofgren, MD, to help build the organization’s executive team and lead its operational transformation. They were reunited after the two worked together for five years at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. During their tenure at OU Health, annual revenue grew from $1.9 billion and is trending toward $3.6 billion, while the system expanded its physician workforce and clinical programs, according to OU Health.
Mr. Curtright told Becker’s he is excited to take on a more externally focused leadership role while continuing OU Health’s strategy for advanced subspecialty care. He discussed the leadership transition, the health system’s partnership strategy, a 200-researcher growth initiative known as Project 200 with the University of Oklahoma, the next phase of growth and the three responsibilities he believes a CEO can never delegate.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: You’ve been at OU Health since 2022, first as COO and now stepping into the CEO role. What does that transition feel like from the inside, and what, if anything, changes for you in how you lead?
Jonathan Curtright: There’s no greater compliment than choosing to work for somebody twice. This was my second stint with Dr. Lofgren. I worked for five years with him at the University of Kentucky when he was the chief operating officer. Rick called me about four and a half years ago and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about this new job. Would you be interested in coming with me and really creating the OU Health Way and building something that hasn’t historically been there in the past?” And I said, “Wow, that sounds like an incredible opportunity.” It’s the state’s only academic medical center, really has a focus on the entire state of Oklahoma, and it was something I was really excited about.
Our values, our winning aspirations have not changed. Our strategy of advanced subspecialty care has not changed in any way, shape or form. A COO is oftentimes focused on execution and keeping the train on the track, if you will, and really performing at a very high level, and I think we’ve done that. But the CEO is a different vantage point. It’s a chance to develop strategy, it’s a chance to develop leaders, and it’s one I’m very excited about. It’ll be much more of an externally facing role. So the organization hasn’t changed much. Our strategy hasn’t changed much. But my seat, in a sense, has.
Q: OU Health has been on a significant growth trajectory in recent years. What does the road ahead look like?
JC: The main thing is, how do we ensure that we have the resources to do the job now? Whether that’s philanthropy, whether that’s the number of physicians, whether that’s the nurses we need to take care of patients at the moment of truth. I do think resources will be something we’re going to have to have laser-like focus on as we continue our growth trajectory.
When we look forward to this next year, fiscal year 2027, this year is the year of accelerated momentum and growth. Our strategy once again isn’t going to change, but now we need to go faster. How do we execute even more clearly and with more alignment with the overall University of Oklahoma?
Q: What is the most pressing strategic priority in your first year as CEO, and how are you thinking about the ongoing impacts of HR 1?
JC: Our team can’t control policy that happens at the federal level, nor at the state level. We can influence things, and we certainly have an active lobbying and government relations team, but we can’t control that.
But there are a few things we can control. We know that the next phase of expansion for OU Health is going to be really around partnerships. There is a dearth of physicians, especially advanced subspecialists, in the state of Oklahoma, so we must grow in this expansion. A lot of places nationally, it’s all about gobbling up healthcare systems or hospitals, especially in rural settings, and that’s not our model. We want to partner with rural and regional healthcare systems whenever possible to make it so we can push healthcare as close to the patient as possible. We do believe that healthcare is a local game.
OU Health will be better when healthcare is provided locally, and then when and only when there’s a need for advanced subspecialty care should OU Health be the partner for complex cardiology or complex neurosciences care, neurosurgery and the like. Those are things that only we can do.
Q: Which partnerships have stood out to you?
JC: A few examples might be helpful. Oncology care in Tulsa and Northeast Oklahoma: You’re 10 or 15 times more likely to be enrolled in a clinical trial if you’re a patient with a new cancer diagnosis and you live in Tulsa County, Oklahoma County or Cleveland County, where Norman is. It shouldn’t be that way. Our state Legislature said to us, “You need to expand into Northeast Oklahoma and partner with a local healthcare system to provide care in Tulsa and Northeast Oklahoma. What we did is we spent a lot of time getting to know Hillcrest HealthCare System in Tulsa, and we were able to partner with their oncology care, radiation medicine care, and make it so that more and more infusions and clinical trials are now happening in Tulsa. We didn’t buy that practice, but we said to them, “We want to work with you to provide that oncology care in Tulsa.” That’s an example of partnership without ownership.
A second example would be Stillwater Medical Center. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, we provide all of the neonatal intensive care unit physicians, the neonatologists that practice in Stillwater Medical Center. Lower-complexity NICU patients are now going to get their care in Stillwater. In the past, they would always have to travel down the road to Oklahoma City to our Oklahoma Children’s Hospital. Now more and more of those babies are able to stay in Stillwater with their moms and get the care they need. The benefit to us at OU Health is that we’re able to provide more care across the state of Oklahoma in Stillwater, and it creates more capacity for high-complexity patients right here in Oklahoma City. The percentage of patient days for NICU babies in Oklahoma City has grown from around 70% to approaching 90% for what we call level 3 and 4, the highest-complexity patients out there. But that wouldn’t have happened unless we partnered with Stillwater Medical Center, which now has level 2. We don’t own them. We want that care to be local, and we want to keep those jobs local in Stillwater.
Q: Academic health systems carry a tripartite mission: patient care, research and education. Where do you see the greatest tension between those three, and how do you resolve it?
JC: I’m reminded of a boss I had early in my career. He looked at me and said the main thing that matters was research, and clinical practice was a nice to have. I thought, gosh, that’s not the Mayo Clinic, and that’s not the way I had been taught to provide care and be involved with leadership. At Mayo, and I would say at OU Health, we believe that you can be outstanding at research and clinical practice, not research or clinical practice.
I call this the power of “and.” The power of “and” says that the best academic medical centers in the United States have outstanding research, and that research flows out of outstanding clinical practice. They build off each other. The more clinical practice, essentially the better your advanced subspecialty care, the more researchers are going to be interested, like a magnet, and be attracted to your organization. And then the same thing happens in reverse. The more research you do, the more higher-complexity patients you’re going to attract.
One example on the tripartite mission is what we call Project 200. Project 200 says that we are going to grow 200 research-intensive faculty members at the University of Oklahoma, and 150 of those will be in the College of Medicine. This is the biggest investment we have right now. We will have 150 NIH-funded researchers really focused on advancing our mission relative to advanced subspecialty care. At a time when many academic medical centers are hunkering down, slowing down and decreasing the amount of investments they’re making, especially coming out of COVID and then coming out of HR 1, we are doing the polar opposite. We are growing and thriving in the midst of this chaos.
Q: What did you learn from your partnership with Dr. Lofgren that you’ll carry forward, and what’s one assumption you’ve had to revisit now that you’re in the CEO seat?
JC: Rick was really known for his Lofgrenisms, if you will. Sometimes I would come up with a solution, and he’d go, “Jonathan, that’s a great solution. Now, what was the question again?” In other words, what are we solving for? Clearly understanding what you’re solving for and the why that you’re taking something on is just a classic Rick Lofgrenism. It’s so simple, except we mess it up all the time. We get focused on our solution instead of stepping back and really questioning what we’re solving for.
The second thing I would say is Rick didn’t have to be the smartest person in the room. That was one of his superpowers, that he was more than willing to let others get credit and take the lead on things. But one of the things Rick was known for was the power of an incredible question. As a CEO, you can sometimes slow the conversation down and say, “Now, what are we solving for? What is it that we’re trying to improve for our patient? How is the decision we’re working through here, how does it improve the health of Oklahomans?” The power of a well-timed, well-articulated question — I can’t stress enough how important that is and what a great skill it is for a CEO.
Q: As you step into the CEO role, what do you believe is truly non-delegable? Has your thinking on that shifted at all in this first week on the job?
JC: There are a couple of things you cannot delegate. No. 1 is strategy creation. What is your winning aspiration going to be, where you will play and how you will perform? You cannot delegate strategy. The second thing a CEO can’t delegate is talent recruitment, development and investing in that talent. Leadership talent and strategy are inextricably linked with the role of CEO. The third thing I would say you cannot delegate is resource allocation.
My job is to really make the complex appear simple. When those are the three things I build my day around — What are you doing to improve your strategy? Do you have good, solid leadership in place to execute on that strategy? And are you allocating resources to ensure that leadership has the resources they need so they can execute on the strategy that’s been developed? — it’s kind of back to the future, in a sense.
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