In this recurring article, we track the career moves of the Health Evolution community. For this version, we’re looking at who’s been on the move in September and October. If you recently made a career change, let us know here.
Providers
It was quite the 30-day stretch for CEO departures of major health systems. In mid-September, Marna Borgstrom, CEO of Yale New Haven Health, a large health system in Connecticut, announced she will step down from the role on April 1, 2022 with Yale New Haven President Christopher O’Connor succeeding her. Borgstrom has worked at the health system for more than 40 years and was named CEO in 2005. In her years at the helm, she has overseen growth including increasing beds across the system from 1,545 to 2,681 and revenue from $1.4 billion to $5.3 billion.
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Sarah Krevans, CEO of Sutter Health in Northern California, announced she will retire from the organization in early 2022. Krevans joined Sutter in 2016, replacing longtime CEO Patrick Fry and was the system’s first woman CEO. She helped expand mental health and digital health offerings during her five-plus years in charge. Her successor has yet to be named.
Another California-based health system leader, Lloyd Dean, CEO of CommonSpirit Health, announced his retirement as well. Dean said he will step down in the Summer of 2022. Dean became the sole CEO of the health system after leading Dignity Health for 19 years. In 2019, Dignity Health merged with Catholic Health Initiatives. Initially, he led the combined $30 billion organization as a co-CEO with Kevin Lofton until Lofton retired in June 2020. Along with the merger between Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives, Dean’s tenure as a leader was notable for his commitment to health equity initiatives, including a recent partnership with Morehouse School for Medicine to commit $100 million over ten years to increase the number of Black doctors and efforts with the Baylor College of Medicine, Creighton University and the Morehouse School of Medicine. He also helped President Obama pass the Affordable Care Act.
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And in mid-October, one of Health Evolution’s Leadership Committee members, Stephen Klasko, MD, President of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health announced plans to leave the organization at the end of the year. During his eight-year tenure at Jefferson as CEO, Klasko oversaw the growth of the health system from three hospitals to 18 and revenue of $1.5 billion to $7 billion. Most recently, he oversaw the acquisition of Einstein Healthcare Network and the pending acquisition of Health Partners Plans. This past week, Jefferson announced an innovation partnership with General Catalyst. Klasko said for his next role he wants to be a part of the digital transformation of health care. Emeritus Board Trustee H. Richard Haverstick, Jr. will serve as interim President and CEO as of January 1, 2022 and his long-term successor will be determined through a nationwide search.
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Mark Sevco will assume the role of president, UPMC Hospitals, comprised of 40 academic, community and specialty hospitals. Joon Lee, MD, will become president of UPMC Physician Services, overseeing its 4,200 employed physicians. 9/15
Phoenix-based Banner Health named Amy Perry as its new President and COO. She is taking on the role in early November. 9/16
Gary Kaplan, MD, CEO of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, will be stepping down from his role at the end of the year. 9/21
Mount Sinai Health System named Margaret Pastuszko as president and chief operating officer, the first woman to hold the role. 9/23
Grand View Health President and CEO Jean Keeler retired at the end of September. She spent 39 years with the health system. 9/24
Jeff Alter took the reins at Summit Health, based in New Jersey, which is the newly formed organization from the merger of Summit Medical Group and CityMD. 10/4
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center announced COO Steve Davis, MD will succeed longtime President and CEO Michael Fisher on Nov. 22. 10/4
Acadia Health CEO Debbie Osteen will retire by the end of January 2022, the Franklin, Tennessee-based behavioral health care provider announced. 10/5
Mercy, a Midwestern-based health system, named Steve Macklin as its next CEO, effective in April 2022. Macklin replaces Lynn Britton, who has been in the CEO role for 13 years and will transition into a new role as executive chair of Mercy’s board of directors. 10/6
Hoda Asmar, MD was appointed CMO of Providence. 10/13
CVS Health named Joneigh Khaldun, MD as its first Chief Health Equity Officer. 10/18
Payers
Cigna named Eric Palmer the incoming CEO of its Evernorth health-services business. He will become Evernorth’s CEO on Jan. 1 and was previously serving as COO. Before that, he was Cigna’s CFO. Cigna launched the Evernorth brand a year ago. He will succeed Evernorth’s current chief executive, Tim Wentworth, who joined the company after the Express Scripts acquisition. Matt Manders, president of government and solutions and Steve Miller, MD chief clinical officer at Cigna, are also former Express Scripts executives who are leaving the organization. “With the successful completion of our integration over one year ago, the launch of Evernorth, and the significant growth of Evernorth and our U.S. Government businesses, they are transitioning to our next generation of enterprise leaders,” Cigna CEO David Cordani said in a statement. 9/23
AmeriHealth Caritas, a Medicaid managed care company, announced it has appointed William T. Keena as market president of its New Hampshire plan. 9/23
Sunshine Health, a wholly owned subsidiary of Centene Corporation, appointed Nathan Landsbaum as Plan President and CEO, effective Sept. 26. 9/27
Online insurance broker eHealth named Fran Soistman as its new CEO. 9/28
Anthem made several changes to its senior leadership team: Pete Haytaian will lead Anthem’s diversified business group and its PBM, IngenioRx. Morgan Kendrick will lead Anthem’s commercial business, as Executive Vice President and President, Commercial and Specialty Business. Rajeev Ronanki has been named President, Digital Platforms. 10/5
Humana named Vivek Garg, MD as CMO of its primary care business. 10/7
Blue Cross Blue Shield Association announced Adam Myers, MD as its new senior vice president and chief clinical transformation officer and Christina Fisher as its new executive vice president and chief financial officer. 10/19
Tech/Other
Jonathan Perlin, MD was named the next President and CEO of The Joint Commission, effective the first day of March in 2022. Perlin is currently the President, Clinical Operations and CMO of HCA Healthcare. Mark R. Chassin, MD, current President and CEO, The Joint Commission, said in a statement: “Jonathan is a nationally recognized leader and expert in quality improvement. I know that he will continue to transform The Joint Commission’s critical work to improve patient safety and quality of care in health care organizations across the country and around the world.” Perlin is a member of the Health Evolution Leadership Committee.
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Francis Collins, MD, PhD, National Institutes of Health Director, will step down from the role at the end of the year. Collins has been at the helm of the agency for 12 years. An interim director has not been named. President Biden will nominate a permanent successor, who will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Collins was the longest serving NIH director in the history of the agency. 10/4
Zane Burke was named CEO of Quantum Health, a consumer health care navigation company. Burke was previously the CEO of Livongo Health, where he led the company to the largest digital health IPO in history and its eventual $18.5 billion merger with Teladoc Health. Prior to that, Burke spent two decades with Cerner. 9/16
NextGen Healthcare appointed former Teladoc executive David Sides as its new CEO. 9/21
Quartet Health brought on four new executives. The tech and services company added Christina Mainelli from Beacon Health Options as Chief Operating Officer, Anay Patel from Accolade as Head of Corporate Development & Strategic Planning, Chris Hendry as Vice President of Patient Operations, coming from Aspire, and Shannon Jacobs as Vice President of Market Operations, also from Aspire. 9/23
Rendever, a virtual reality platform for seniors overcoming social isolation, hired Jennifer Stamps, PhD as its director of research. 9/23
Peter Marks, MD, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is temporarily taking over the agency’s vaccine office on an acting basis. He replaces previous director Marion Gruber, Ph.D. and Deputy Director Phillip Krause, M.D., who both left last month. 9/28
The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced the appointment of Lisa J. Pino as Director of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). 10/27
Desktop Health named Wally Renne, DMD as VP of Clinical Strategy. 10/4
Andrea Marks was named the VP of clinical performance for Walmart’s Health and Wellness team. 10/6
Robert Musselwhite was named President of Definitive Healthcare, which recently had an initial public offering. Musselwhite most recently served as the CEO of OptumInsight, the health services business of Optum. He joined Optum in November 2017 following Optum’s acquisition of The Advisory Board Company. 10/7
COTA, an analytics company focused on cancer research, named Ritu Bahal as its new CFO. She comes from WPP/Kantar Group in a variety of financial leadership roles. 10/13
Thirty Madison, a health care tech company for people with chronic conditions, announced the hiring of Matthew Mengerink, the company’s first CTO. Mengerink comes from Uber, where he lead the company’s infrastructure engineering team. 10/14
Veta Health, a provider of digital solutions for remote patient care and chronic condition monitoring , appointed a new CEO, James Sutcliffe, who joined from DayToDay Health. 10/18
Walgreens Boots Alliance named Anita Allemand as its Chief Transformation and Integration Officer and Holly May as its Executive Vice President and Global Chief Human Resources Officer. 10/18
Life Sciences
AeroSafe Global, which offers cold chain solutions to pharma companies, announced that Rick Lozano has joined the company as Chief Commercial Officer. 9/15
Carolin Barth, MD became CEO of MiroBio, a precision therapy company, after a lengthy run at Novartis as global head of commercial and pipeline strategy, cell and gene. 9/21
Esker Therapeutics, a precision medicine company, named Martin Babler as its president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board of directors. Babler most recently led Principia Biopharma to a $3.7 billion exit to Sanofi. The company also added three executives to its team including David Goldstein, PhD, chief scientific officer, Roy Hardiman, chief business officer and general counsel, Kenneth Brameld, PhD, Esker fellow, head of research. 9/23
Precision BioSciences, a clinical stage biotechnology company that uses a genome editing platform to develop allogeneic CAR T and in vivo gene editing therapies, announced that Michael Amoroso has been named the company’s President and CEO. 9/27
Peter Crowley is leaving his role of CEO of Amicus Therapeutics to head up its gene therapy spinout, Caritas. The latter is part of a $600 million special purpose acquisition company deal. 9/29
Sanofi hired Valeria Fantin, PhD, away from Gilead to head up its R&D. She had only been in her role at Gilead for one year. 10/6
Pfizer’s head of development, Rod McKenzie, is retiring in early 2022. He was pivotal to the development of the Pfizer and partner BioNTech’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and has been with the company for 35 years. “This is a bittersweet time for me and for all those colleagues who have worked with him over the course of his career, but I am excited to see the wonderful things he will accomplish in the next chapter of his life,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Ph.D, said in a statement. 10/6
Johnson & Johnson’s chief strategy officer Paul Stoffels, MD is set to retire at the end of the year after a nine-year stint in the role. Under his leadership, J&J’s pharma sales rose from $22.5 billion to $45.6 billion. 10/12
Kojin Therapeutics hired Luba Greenwood as its new CEO. Greenwood leads an all-female C-Suite, which is incredibly rare in the male-dominated biotech world. 10/15
