Being qualified is the price of admission. You need a leader who stays — and a seat that’s ready to keep them. We assess every candidate on our Retention Index™ and introduce only the ones built to stay.
Another vacancy, another interim, another search. The team is stretched, projects slip, and every month the seat sits open costs you.
Every hire comes down to a hunch and a hope. You did the interviews, checked the references, and it still didn't hold — but a decision this important shouldn't rest on hope.
A search firm should send you mission-driven healthcare leaders who stay — those who embody your organizational values and set your team up for success.
The issue is most of this industry is paid at the placement. Whether that person is still there in a year isn't their problem. It's yours.
Leadership turnover in healthcare is disruptive.
Healthcare leaders don't just manage people; they shape the systems that affect patient care, staff engagement, financial performance, regulatory compliance, and long-term strategy. Whether an organization is implementing value-based care, improving patient experience, reducing hospital-acquired infections, or integrating AI, these initiatives require sustained leadership.
Frequent turnover often results in changing priorities, abandoned initiatives, and repeated reorganizations — and the fatigue of absorbing each new direction compounds with every cycle. It rarely stops with the leader, as the strongest people on their team, the ones with options, frequently follow them out, and each of those departures carries its own replacement cost. In the US, replacing a single bedside RN costs about $60,090 on average, and RN turnover alone costs the average hospital between $4.2 and $6.2 million a year — before anyone counts the cost of replacing the leader — trapping organizations in a cycle of starting over at a financial deficit instead of continuously improving.
We assess every candidate for retention before you meet them, using our Retention Index™ — our structured method for measuring whether a leader is built to stay in this seat.
We look at both sides. We assess the candidate for fit and staying power, and we factor in what helps a leader stay once they’re in the seat. Retention is a two-way street.
We only run exclusive retained searches — never contingency. Your leadership search gets our full commitment, start to finish.
We're accountable to the same mission you are — we recruit for the community on the other side of the care, not just the seat on the org chart.
We stand behind every placement with a replacement guarantee and tracking through 180 days.
They learn the roles from job descriptions and the culture from LinkedIn. We learned them from the inside, with over a decade of experience across academic medical centers, ambulatory care clinics, safety-net hospitals, FQHCs, and public health systems — so we can accurately vet leaders who align with your organization's mission and are committed for the long term.
Hand the search off, and keep your focus on the matters only you can handle. We’ll bring you qualified healthcare leaders, discreetly sourced and vetted for retention — not a pile of resumes.
The consultant who scopes your search is the one who runs it, through to the offer. No handoff to a junior associate once the contract is signed.
A new fiscal year, an academic year, an accreditation survey, a board meeting. Tell us at the consultation and we’ll plan the search backward from it, so your leader is in the seat in time. Request a search →
Every candidate is assessed against the seat itself, on the dimensions that matter most to staying power, before we make a single introduction. Being qualified is a given. What the Index weighs is whether this is a role they're likely to stay in.
Every assessment is made by a person from documented, job-related evidence, and every decision is made by a person. Protected characteristics are never recorded or assessed. The methodology is published in summary, with the complete version available on request. Read our candidate notice, and our equal opportunity statement.
The roles below are examples, not a menu. Titles vary. Accountability doesn’t. If the title differs but the leadership mandate is the same, it’s a search we run.
RETAIN HEALTH recruits healthcare leaders across health systems and hospitals, ambulatory care and physician services, and community health — where operational, clinical, quality, and transformation leadership intersect.
The seat sits empty for months while you search again — interim coverage, stalled initiatives, and a bill that grows every week the work goes uncovered.
The team absorbs the loss — morale drops, your strongest people quietly start looking.
You pay to search twice — the same role, the same cost, all over again.
Patient care, safety, and reputation hang in the balance — without leadership in the seat, your mission is what suffers most.
1 U.S. Department of Labor puts the direct cost of a bad hire at roughly 30% of first-year earnings.
2 Interim coverage, overtime, delayed initiatives, and work the team absorbs — varies by organization. Your numbers will differ; the calculator lets you set every assumption yourself.
A leadership search is where that stops being a line on the careers page and starts being a decision. It's the moment you get to invest in the asset that compounds — and you should be able to see exactly what that investment is before you ever pick up the phone.
Retention isn't a nice-to-have — it's one of the largest avoidable costs you carry. Here's what leadership churn actually costs, and why we built a firm to stop it.
RETAIN HEALTH is built to beat these odds — every finalist assessed for alignment and staying power before you ever meet them.
I’ve worked across the full continuum of healthcare delivery — major academic health systems and hospitals, ambulatory care and physician-led practices, and community-based and safety-net organizations. In every one of them, I watched capable leaders get hired and leave before real momentum could ever take hold.
And here's the problem with that in healthcare: leadership exits aren't just an org-chart change. The impact reverberates through the entire organization — the staff lose heart, and the patients bear the cost of the disruption. Having worked alongside these leaders, and coached healthcare executives up to the CEO level at the moment they decided to leave — I know firsthand what makes a healthcare leader thrive in a role and stay.
So partnering with RETAIN HEALTH runs your search through the Retention Index™, built from experience inside these systems and corroborated by published research. You won't just fill a seat — you'll gain a healthcare leader vetted to stay and propel your organization forward, long after most hires would have walked.
Everything a healthcare organization needs to evaluate a search partner is on this page. Here's what's settled — and the three things left.
Not this quarter? Stay in touch ↓
Leave your email and tell us which side of the table you’re on. We’ll be in touch when there’s something worth your time — and you can catch Healthcare’s Keeping Problem, our podcast on retention in healthcare, any time.
Tell us about the seat. We’ll find the leader built to stay in it.