Children’s Minnesota’s 1st female CEO: ‘We need to skate to where the puck will be’

Emily Chapman, MD, began her career in healthcare as a child-life specialist — a clinician who helps children and families navigate challenges of illness, injury, disability and hospitalization by supporting the child’s development. She believes this experience led her directly to the CEO role at Minneapolis-based Children’s Minnesota.

“I subsequently fell in love with medicine, went back to medical school and started that journey, and I think that has informed every chapter in my career,” she told Becker’s. “And it greatly informs my approach to the role of CEO: a reverence for the power of the human connection between the clinical care team and the family, patient and family, that leads to the outcomes that we’re looking for in partnership.”

Dr. Chapman has served as senior vice president of medical affairs and chief medical officer at Children’s Minnesota since 2017. She previously served as vice CMO and director of the hospitalist program. 

Effective Aug. 2, she will become president and CEO of Children’s Minnesota, succeeding Marc Gorelick, MD, who is retiring after a 42-year medical career. Dr. Chapman will be the first female president and CEO in Children’s Minnesota’s 100-year history.

Children’s Minnesota “has been my professional home, and so it’s a real privilege for me to be given this opportunity,” she said. “And as the first woman in the role, I’ve been preceded by some phenomenal leaders, and I’ve been at the organization long enough to have learned from several of them. Given the prominence of the woman’s voice in healthcare, it is a real privilege to represent that in the CEO role as well.”  

Dr. Chapman spoke with Becker’s to share her approach leadership and where she sees Children’s Minnesota, and pediatric healthcare, in the future.

Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Question: You’ve been with Children’s Minnesota for nearly two decades. As you step into the CEO role, what is one area where you believe the organization must think differently to meet the needs of the next generation of pediatric patients?

Dr. Emily Chapman: We have to understand how the times in which we are delivering care are impacting what our strategy is. The preceding 10 years had brought with it a number of challenges, and I appreciate the leadership of Dr. Marc Gorelick through those enormous challenges. 

This next period of time is bringing its own new challenges, and with that, its own opportunities. We had been through a time where we focused particularly on access, on equitable care and on modernizing some of our processes. We have an opportunity now to focus on strategic growth and some targeted innovation.

We’re starting that by transitioning our electronic health record and business platform from the Cerner Oracle product to Epic, which will really lay a foundation for a lot of transformational changes in how we do our work, how we partner with our patients and families, and how we partner with our referring clinicians and community. So that’s a great place for us to be starting. That will be an implementation that takes place in October of 2026, and fundamental to laying that foundation upon which we can build.

Q: You’ve led efforts to label inequity and disrespect as preventable harm. How do you plan to expand that work systemwide as CEO — and what impact do you hope it will have on care outcomes?

EC: I’m extremely proud of what we have already done as a health system to expand accountability for all six domains of quality, including equitable care throughout the entire care team and our support systems as a comprehensive organization. The challenge for us will be to continue to do that effectively in a macro environment that may be less comfortable with some of those conversations that we’ve had openly in the past.

In healthcare, it is critically important that we understand each individual patient — what their needs are, what their social determinants of health are, what the barriers are to our returning them to health. And in order to do that, we must take a lens that allows us to inclusively — well, that allows us to see, hear and value the differences among our patients. And that’s a critical conversation between any physician and patient, and between any health system and its community.

The challenge for us will be to have those continued conversations and to not back away from our increasing recognition of the failures that we have had as a healthcare industry in treating our increasingly diverse populations.

Q: Healthcare leaders today are being challenged to grow strategically while operating under immense financial pressure. What’s your philosophy for balancing investment in growth with the realities of constrained resources?

EC: First and foremost is to manage your attention. As a healthcare leader right now, there are many things coming at us that we need to very thoughtfully respond to, and that can take up most of your time if you’re not careful. The challenge for a healthcare leader is to ensure that you are adequately — and with equanimity — responding to those things that demand your attention while also looking out over the horizon. You know the adage that we need to skate to where the puck is going to be, and with your head down, you can’t do that.

An important part of this, particularly in pediatrics, will be thinking about the emerging therapeutics that are probably going to change pediatric disease and how we deliver care to kids, the changing workforce and the partnership between technology and human intelligence, and how that allows us to improve upon the care delivery and the outcomes that we get, and a number of other factors. Particularly, the concept of regionalization.

What we’re seeing forecasted is while birth rates in the country are declining, we are seeing an increasing demand to shift patients from community hospitals or hospitals that have pediatrics through adult care and transition those patients into pediatric centers. So we have to think increasingly about where we deliver tertiary and quaternary care in our regions, and how we partner to do that most effectively to serve populations that I think are increasingly going to be geographically distributed.

Q: You’re taking the helm at a time when workforce engagement and retention are critical across healthcare. How do you plan to sustain a culture where clinical and non-clinical staff feel empowered to innovate and improve care?

EC: One thing that’s underappreciated is that we are leading a workforce that has experienced trauma in the relatively recent past, and taking a trauma-informed approach to how we re-engage and help heal our workforce is the responsibility of any leader.

Fundamental to delivering care, and particularly delivering care to children, is that human connection, and one has to focus on their own health before they are well-positioned to do that. And that’s not something that we can overlook as leaders.

Leading into human connection — a radically human approach to leadership — is the foundation upon which we can rebuild the engagement of our talent to drive forward the innovations and the advances that we know we’re capable of delivering to our communities.