ZSFG's Physician-CEO Puts Health Equity at the Center

Susan Ehrlich, MD, holds a combination rare in healthcare leadership: she runs Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center while also practicing primary care. According to a 2025 McKinsey survey cited by Becker's Hospital Review, only about 15% of CEOs across healthcare organizations, including health systems and pharmaceutical companies, come from clinical backgrounds.

That dual role shapes how Ehrlich leads a major safety-net hospital. Seeing patients keeps the realities of care disparities in front of her, and she has made reducing those gaps a strategic priority. For a public hospital that serves a large share of low-income, uninsured, and vulnerable patients, equity is not an abstraction but a daily operational question.

The gap between clinical experience and executive leadership matters as systems weigh how care decisions get made at the top. Leaders who still treat patients carry firsthand knowledge of where the system fails the people it is meant to serve, a perspective Ehrlich argues should inform strategy, not just clinical policy.