Specialty Isn't Enough: Reaching the Medical Directors Behind Hospital Purchasing Decisions

If your company sells a diagnostic test, an instrument, a device or a clinical supply into hospitals, you already know that adoption rarely depends on one physician's enthusiasm. 

A clinician may love your product, but the decision to bring it in often runs through someone with broader authority: a chief medical officer, a medical director, or the physician who leads the oncology or emergency service line.

These are the people your commercial team most wants to reach, and they are consistently the hardest to find.

Why the medical director matters

Medical directors and CMOs sit where clinical judgment meets institutional decision-making.

They shape which tests get ordered by default, which equipment gets evaluated, and which new technologies earn a trial. Many serve on or influence the committees that review new products. 

When they're convinced, a product has an advocate inside the room. When they haven't heard of it, even strong clinical interest can stall.

For a marketer, that creates a clear goal: put your evidence in front of the physicians who carry decision-making weight, in the specialty your product serves, before your sales team walks in the door.

The catch: NPI records who a physician is, not what they run

Every practicing physician in the US has a National Provider Identifier (NPI), and the federal registry records their specialty, credentials and practice location. It doesn't record a job title.

Nothing in an individual's NPI record says "medical director" or "CMO."

Leaders don't make it easier. Many keep a low public profile, and their titles are scattered across hospital websites, press releases and professional profiles in inconsistent formats.

Most HCP audience data stops at specialty, which is why so many "decision-maker" audiences are really just specialty audiences with a new label.

So we went looking for places where titles and NPIs could be connected in public data. Here's what we found.

Signal 1: The authorized official on an organization's NPI

Organizations have NPIs too, and every organization record names an authorized official along with that person's title. When the official is a physician, we can match them back to their individual NPI.

This gave us a large starting pool: about 8,000 specialty physicians named as medical director or CMO of an organization. But when we looked closer, the pool skewed toward leaders of clinics and specialty groups rather than service-line heads inside health systems. 

Only 142 were named on a hospital's own NPI. That's a useful audience, but a different one.

Signal 2: The nonprofit hospital's tax return

Nonprofit hospitals file IRS Form 990 every year, and the form requires them to list their officers, key employees and highest-compensated staff, with titles. 

That's where hospital medical leadership shows up: chief medical officers, medical directors, chief physicians, VPs of medical affairs, and chief clinical and quality officers.

Across tax years 2023 through 2025, we matched 1,122 physicians with medical leadership titles at hospital organizations to their NPIs.

The most telling result was how little the two sources overlapped. Only 5 physicians appeared in both the NPI records and the 990s. The sources weren't confirming each other; they were finding different people. 

Together, they reach much further into hospital leadership than either one alone.

Signal 3: Where the physician actually practices

A name and a title are a strong start, but not a confirmation. 

To check the matches, we used CMS facility affiliation data, which links clinicians to the specific hospitals where they provide care. If a physician listed as CMO of a health system is also affiliated with that system's hospital, the match is confirmed.

That check confirmed 616 hospital medical leaders. It also resolved cases where a name matched several physicians: in 96 of them, exactly one candidate was affiliated with the right hospital.

A finding we didn't expect: the executive who stopped seeing patients

Hundreds of matches had no affiliation with their own hospital. Our first assumption was that they were wrong matches. The data suggested otherwise.

CMS affiliation data only includes clinicians who bill Medicare, and many full-time CMOs have stepped away from patient care. Of the unconfirmed physicians, 571 had no hospital affiliation anywhere, and most didn't appear in the CMS clinician file at all. That's exactly what a full-time executive looks like in claims-based data. Nothing contradicted those matches, so they stay in the audience.

A smaller group of 153 was affiliated only with other hospitals. Some are real (a CMO who still practices at a sister facility), but some may be a different physician with the same name. We hold those back.

Where the data runs thin: service-line directors

Hospital-wide leaders proved findable. Service-line leaders were harder.

Oncology. We identified 156 oncology medical directors and leaders: oncologists titled medical director or CMO, oncology leaders named on 990s, and oncologists serving as hospital medical leaders. The pool is small because oncology leadership mostly sits inside hospitals and cancer centers, and only the most senior roles appear on tax filings.

‍Emergency medicine. We found 575, just short of a campaign-ready size. This group had one notable pattern: 143 emergency physicians serve as hospital medical leaders. Emergency medicine is a common path into the CMO role, which makes these physicians relevant whether you sell to the emergency department or the hospital as a whole.

For both specialties, there's a second group worth considering: specialists named as president, CEO, owner, partner or founder of their organization. They aren't medical directors by title, but they run their practices and make purchasing decisions. Adding them brings oncology to 2,138 and emergency medicine to 3,633.

Whether they belong in your audience depends on how your product is bought:

• In oncology, practice leaders are a strong fit. Independent oncology practices choose their own tests, therapies and equipment, so the owner or president often is the decision maker.
• In emergency medicine, it depends. Emergency physician groups typically staff hospital emergency departments under contract, while the hospital buys the equipment and supplies. Group leaders can influence those choices, but for an equipment sale, the named directors plus hospital medical leaders may be the better audience.

What the audience looks like

Segments are sized independently and aren't additive.

What we'd tell you in the room

These audiences are strong, and they have limits you should know before you plan around them:

• Form 990s only cover nonprofits. Leaders at for-profit systems and government hospitals are underrepresented.
• Organization titles are self-reported and not always kept current.
• These are carefully matched candidates, not a verified roster. The hospital medical director audience has an extra layer of confirmation; the oncology and emergency medicine expansions rely on name, state and title.
• Hospital medical leadership includes some elected roles, such as chief of staff and medical staff president. If your product calls for appointed executives only, those can be removed.

Why a focused audience is an advantage

A few hundred to a few thousand decision makers is the right scale for this kind of product. Every impression reaches someone with real influence over what gets evaluated, instead of spreading your budget across every physician in a specialty.

A focused audience still needs refinement, and that's how our PrioritySignal™ approach works:

1. Priority Audience. Launch the core directors and the expansion as separate segments, so you can see how each performs on its own before deciding where to invest.
2. Provider Engagement. Provider-level reporting shows, by NPI and name, which leaders received your message and which engaged with it, without relying on form fills that physician executives rarely complete.
3. Provider Intelligence. Look for patterns. If named directors engage at a higher rate than practice leaders, that shapes your next budget decision. If several leaders from the same health system engage, that points to an account where interest is emerging.
4. Commercial Activation. Give your commercial team a named list of engaged decision makers to prioritize, retarget them with deeper content such as a Product Explainer or clinical evidence summary, and expand into the broader segment once the core is performing.
   

The audience isn't fixed at launch. It gets sharper as engagement data comes in.

The takeaway

No one publishes a list of hospital medical directors, and specialty data alone won't find them.

But public filings, organization records and CMS affiliation data, used together and checked against each other, identify an audience of physician leaders that is specific, reachable and credible.

If your product needs a champion inside the health system, you can find the physicians most likely to be that champion, and learn which of them are paying attention.

Discuss your HCP strategy →

Methodology: Active individual physician NPIs from the August 2026 NPPES release. Titles come from authorized officials on organization NPIs (NPPES) and from officers, key employees and highest-compensated staff reported on IRS Form 990 filings by nonprofit hospital organizations (tax years 2023–2025), matched to NPIs by name and state. Hospital affiliations from CMS Facility Affiliation data (August 2026) and CMS Hospital General Information (July 2026). Oncology includes medical, hematology, radiation and gynecologic oncology.

Q&A: Finding the Medical Director

Is there really no public list of hospital medical directors?

No. The NPI registry records a physician's specialty, credentials and practice location, but not their title. "Medical director" and "CMO" simply don't exist as fields, so any audience built from NPI data alone is a specialty list.

Where did the medical director titles actually come from?

Three public sources: the authorized official listed on an organization's own NPI, the officers and key employees that nonprofit hospitals report on IRS Form 990, and CMS facility affiliation data used to confirm where a physician practices. None of these sources was built to identify decision makers, but together they do.

What happened to the medical directors with no hospital affiliation?

CMS affiliation data only includes clinicians who still bill Medicare. Many full-time CMOs have stepped away from patient care entirely, so they show up with no billing footprint anywhere. That's consistent with being a full-time executive, not a sign the match is wrong, so those 571 physicians stayed in the audience.

Why is the oncology and emergency medicine audience so much smaller than the hospital-wide one?

Service-line leadership sits deeper inside the organization and rarely makes it onto a tax filing. Oncology leadership in particular mostly lives inside hospitals and cancer centers rather than independent practices, which is why the named-director pool is only 156 before any expansion.

Should practice owners and presidents be included alongside named medical directors?

It depends on how the product is purchased. Independent practices typically choose their own tests and equipment, so a practice owner is often the decision-maker. In emergency medicine, directors and hospital leaders tend to own the purchasing decision.