50+ years inside healthcare facilities.
Not from the sidelines.

Dr. Will Daniel is a nationally recognized physician executive and quality leader known for delivering transformative clinical, operational, and cultural outcomes across complex, multi-hospital health systems. He currently serves as Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where he is also the William T. Solomon Professor in Clinical Quality Improvement and Professor of Internal Medicine, with enterprise responsibility for quality, safety, patient experience, operational excellence, and high-reliability transformation.

Previously, Dr. Daniel served as the inaugural Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, a ten-hospital integrated delivery system nationally recognized for performance excellence and the first hospital system to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award®. In this role, he led systemwide quality, safety, and performance transformation efforts that produced nationally benchmarked outcomes and durable improvements in clinical reliability and value.

Across his career, Dr. Daniel has held senior executive and physician leadership roles spanning academic medical centers and community-based health systems. He has led large-scale clinical transformation initiatives focused on reducing mortality, eliminating unwarranted variation, improving patient experience, and strengthening operational and financial performance. His work consistently aligns frontline execution with enterprise strategy, producing measurable and sustained results.

Dr. Daniel has directed enterprise quality and safety programs that achieved significant reductions in serious safety events, hospital-acquired conditions, and sepsis-related mortality, while also improving length of stay, cost per case, and systemwide reliability. He has designed and deployed integrated analytics, Lean process improvement, and clinician-led governance models to hardwire performance improvement at scale.

He is also a national leader in advancing surgical safety through the implementation of OR Black Box technology across enterprise operating rooms. By deploying high-fidelity audio, video, and physiologic data capture at scale, Dr. Daniel enabled objective, system-level learning across approximately 54,000 surgical procedures. Through adoption of a just-culture “What Can We Learn” review model, teams shifted from individual blame to system reliability, strengthening teamwork and performance. This work contributed to more than 1,000 consecutive days without a retained foreign object, improved timeout and debrief reliability, and delivered measurable reductions in surgical mortality, length of stay, and ICU utilization—establishing national leadership in data-driven surgical safety.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Daniel served as Executive Commander of the UT Southwestern Medical Center Emergency Operations Center, overseeing pandemic response, workforce and patient safety, clinical operations, and the phased restoration of services across the academic health system. His leadership ensured continuity of care, rapid operational decision-making, and organizational resilience during an unprecedented period of disruption.

A committed leader in physician engagement and development, Dr. Daniel has advanced clinically integrated networks, multidisciplinary care models, and physician-led improvement infrastructures that strengthen accountability, trust, and execution across complex organizations. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a Baldrige Executive Fellow, and his innovative approach to healthcare delivery has resulted in multiple issued patents.

Dr. Daniel completed his medical education at UT Southwestern Medical Center, internal medicine residency at Washington University Barnes-Jewish Hospital, cardiology fellowship training at UT Southwestern, and interventional cardiology fellowship at the Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Princeton University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Tennessee.

Dr. Daniel’s career reflects a consistent focus on translating strategy into execution, aligning clinicians and leaders around shared outcomes, and building systems capable of delivering sustained excellence in quality, safety, and value.

Dr. John Brennan is an Adjunct Professor of Health Care Management at the University of Texas Southwestern’s O’Donnell School of Public Health and a Baldrige Executive Fellow and Examiner. He is widely recognized for integrating complex health systems, advancing clinical performance, and driving sustainable cultural and operational transformation at scale.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Brennan has served as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Medical Officer, Executive Vice President, and senior academic affairs executive within major health systems. In 2022, he was appointed the Inaugural CEO of the Joint Pediatric Enterprise between Children’s Health of Texas and UT Southwestern, a landmark collaboration advancing pediatric clinical care, research, and education.

Dr. Brennan has led large-scale clinical integrations across multiple health systems. He directed the clinical integration of Barnabas Health Care System’s 10 hospitals and extensive outpatient network, strengthening clinical performance, enabling strategic growth, and positioning the system for its successful merger with Robert Wood Johnson Health System. At Wellstar Health System, he was recruited to integrate 11 hospitals into a unified enterprise. The success of this effort was cited by Moody’s and S&P, which highlighted Wellstar’s clinically integrated network of nearly 2,000 physicians and its accountable care organization as core strengths supporting the System’s strong credit ratings.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Brennan was a principal executive leader overseeing workforce protection, continuity of operations, patient and community care, predictive analytics, service reactivation, vaccine distribution to more than 24,000 team members, and long-term System preparedness. 

A nationally recognized physician leader, Dr. Brennan established and expanded physician leadership development programs, restructured 13 service lines, and grew the Wellstar Clinical Partners clinically integrated network to nearly 2,000 physicians. Under his leadership, quality and safety outcomes improved significantly, including reductions in serious safety events and sepsis-related mortality, alongside measurable improvements in safety culture and high reliability practices.

He co-led the creation of the “One Wellstar” physician enterprise, aligning physicians around clinical excellence, value-based care, strategic growth, and reduction of unwarranted variation.

Dr. Brennan oversaw systemwide quality and safety initiatives that resulted in Wellstar Paulding Hospital receiving the 2020 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, two Wellstar hospitals earning Georgia’s Oglethorpe/Sterling Award, and Wellstar being named a finalist for the American Hospital Association’s Quest for Quality Award. He and his team led the training of more than 10,000 physicians and team members in high reliability and safety-first relationship and reliability skills, while also advancing clinician and employee wellness programs.

His work in community health includes co-founding the Greater Newark Health Care Coalition, an innovative, multi-sector partnership recognized with the American Hospital Association’s NOVA Award for community impact. At Wellstar, he launched the Center for Health Equity, accelerating efforts to address food insecurity, opioid misuse, access to primary care, women’s health, suicide prevention, and cancer screening.

In addition, Dr. Brennan has led enterprise intelligence, enterprise project management, and systemwide strategic planning initiatives, including clinician workforce planning, clinical growth strategies, and health plan redesign. He has served on numerous health system and community boards, chaired quality committees, and provided executive leadership across academic, clinical, and community governance.Dr. Brennan’s career reflects a consistent focus on aligning strategy, culture, quality, and physician leadership to deliver high-performing, patient-centered care.