How Northwell’s new CEO envisions growth in its next chapter

Modern Healthcare – Wednesday, October 1, 2025
By Caroline Hudson

Northwell Health’s new President and CEO Dr. John D’Angelo is eyeing more growth for the nonprofit system as he takes the helm.

D’Angelo, who took over the top role Wednesday, said one of his priorities is recalibrating Northwell operations to include Nuvance Health, which it acquired in May. He is also looking at expansion opportunities in ambulatory care and implementing new technology to scale the system.

D’Angelo started his career at Northwell more than 25 years ago as an emergency medicine physician at Glen Cove Hospital. He later became senior vice president of Northwell’s emergency medicine service line and chief of integrated operations. D’Angelo was most recently executive vice president of the health system’s central region.

Northwell has grown into a nearly $23 billion system with 28 hospitals in New York and Connecticut, 1,000 care sites, and a network of home care, rehabilitation and end-of-life services.

In an interview, D’Angelo said his regular meetings with board members and former President and CEO Michael Dowling, who stepped down after 23 years, have prepared him to lead Northwell’s next chapter. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your focus areas as the new CEO?

The CEO transition, in and of itself, is a high priority. It’s a big change for the organization. There are senior leaders who are also transitioning — a lot of people who have been with Michael since he’s been here. We’ve also been very good at building a great bench, and it gives me an opportunity to start to form my team.

The second major priority is the Nuvance merger, which is the largest merger in our history as an organization. We’ve grown one hospital at a time over the years, but with the Nuvance merger, that brings in seven hospitals. It’s our first time bringing in hospitals in another state.

The third major priority is that we are about to go live with our first wave of the Epic implementation. We’ve trained about 35,000 users for our first wave, which kicks off Nov. 1. Then there are another 45,000 users for our second wave.

How does the Nuvance deal fit into Northwell’s larger growth strategy?

We’ve been an organization that has evolved through aggressive expansion. I think our scale and ability to operate as one system has proven to be a big part of our success. Nuvance is a big merger all at once, but we’re still in a growth mindset. There are a lot of ambulatory opportunities that we’re very interested in pursuing, especially as it relates to the Nuvance system. Growth is not just hospitals.

We are hoping to hit the ground running by the first quarter of 2026. What are the high-value, easier-to-do things that we’re going to tackle first? What’s the timeline? What are we going to commit to? That’s the process we’re going through now.

How would you like to grow the ambulatory network?

It depends on the community. I’ll give an example. I ran the central market of Northwell for the last four years. Even within that market, I had different strategies for the submarkets.

We have every discipline you can imagine in a portion of the market where North Shore University Hospital, Cohen Children’s and Long Island Jewish are. We’ve tried to evolve how we think about tertiary and quaternary care there, but also the ambulatory side. The transplant and cardiovascular institutes are a great example of this. So, think about specialized services and programs focused on the patient you can do when you have that level of concentration.

In Queens, we don’t have as robust of an ambulatory network. We have a different mindset there. Do we offer primary care? Primary specialty care? Basic cardiology? Gastrointestinal? OB/GYN? Do we have that footprint where we would like it? We think about how the ambulatory network relates to the adjacent hospitals, to the types of programs those communities need or where there are gaps. That’s the assessment we’re going through as we think about Nuvance.

Will there be operational changes?

We’ve historically operated out of three markets — east, central and west. Now with Nuvance, we’re redefining those markets. We have four, maybe five markets where we’re going through an evolution and finding that balance of what you do centrally versus the responsibility you push into the market leadership.

Is there a such thing as too much growth?

I think it has to be very smart growth. It’s got to be accretive. We aren’t growing for growth’s sake. We can’t take on anything that’s going to put the organization at an unacceptable level of risk. It’s hard because there are a lot of hospitals out there that are really struggling. We are always in conversations. You can’t do everything, so we have to be very strategic about the type of deal and when.

How are you hoping to put your stamp on the organization?

I see this as a continued evolution. It’s not a revolution. We’re a successful organization, but there are opportunities for improvement in many different areas.

I’ve been involved with innovation and transformation in the organization, whether it’s around data, operations, flow or process, and it’s a passion of mine. I’m going to keep pushing the system to the limits of seeing how we can do things better.

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