Executive Search: A Private Hospital Group Chief Operating Officer Case Study

How Stanton Chase transplanted a non-medical COO into Serbia’s leading private hospital group

>The Background

Why Serbia’s Leading Private Hospital Group Needed a New COO

Our client is the leading private healthcare provider in Serbia. The group runs a general hospital, several specialized medical centers, a nationwide network of outpatient clinics, and a large number of diagnostic laboratories across the country. Formed through the merger of several long-standing medical institutions, the group today employs around 1,700 full-time healthcare professionals, alongside more than 600 consultants covering over 40 medical specialties.

The board engaged Stanton Chase to run a healthcare executive search for a new Chief Operating Officer, with responsibility for operational development, profitability, and coordination across all business segments, including both inpatient and outpatient care.

>The Challenge

Diagnosing a One-of-a-Kind COO Profile

The company had recently been acquired by a foreign healthcare group, which created a period of uncertainty about its future direction and made the Chief Operating Officer role unusually demanding. There is no directly comparable private healthcare institution in Serbia from which to source ready-made candidates, so the diagnosis for our healthcare executive search was clear: candidates for the COO role had to come from outside the Serbian healthcare sector entirely.

The role also calls for experience running large, multi-site operations of the kind found in major retail businesses, of which Serbia has very few. On top of that, the incoming Chief Operating Officer would arrive from a non-medical background and be expected to manage senior medical professionals, which is uncommon in the Serbian healthcare sector and could initially generate internal resistance.

>The Solution

Operating Outside Healthcare to Find the Right COO

Given how demanding the COO role was, we ran a healthcare executive search that operated across two candidate populations in parallel.

The first group: ambitious senior leaders in Serbia who may have reached a plateau in their current positions and were quietly looking for a bigger operational mandate. The second: CEOs of smaller Serbian organisations who would welcome the move into a new industry and a C-1 role inside a larger, more complex business.

After a careful longlist-to-shortlist process across regulated industries including pharmaceuticals, insurance, and telecommunications, the selected candidate was the CEO of a Serbian insurance company. After several years in that role, he had reached a professional comfort zone and was actively looking for a larger operational mandate. The Chief Operating Officer role at a hospital group going through major change post-acquisition was exactly the prescription he was looking for.

>Our Team

Healthcare Executive Search Specialists with a Belgrade Base

This healthcare executive search was led by Stanton Chase Belgrade in partnership with our regional Life Sciences and Healthcare practice. Our team has long-standing relationships across the Serbian healthcare sector and runs healthcare executive search assignments regularly, particularly for roles where the right Chief Operating Officer or Chief Executive Officer has to come from an adjacent regulated industry, and where matrix organizational structures and multi-site healthcare operations make business-side leadership more valuable than sector-specific clinical experience.

For healthcare executive search across Serbia, Belgrade, and the wider Western Balkans, our team can find executive leadership candidates from inside and outside the healthcare sector.