Partners HealthCare CEO to Step Down, Join Partners In Health
Dr. Gary Gottlieb, CEO of Partners HealthCare, the largest health-care provider in Massachusetts, is leaving his post to join Partners In Health, a nonprofit that provides medical services in impoverished places from Peru to Rwanda.
The change is a significant one for all parties involved. The nonprofit Partners HealthCare owns Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, and several other hospitals in the region, employing about 60,000 people. It also has a $1.4 billion research budget, giving it significant influence in both local and national conversations surrounding science, technology, innovation, and disease treatment.
Partners HealthCare has been looking to expand even further, by acquiring new hospitals on the South Shore and north of Boston, but that plan is pending a settlement with the attorney general, currently in front of a judge, that would aim to limit Partners’ costs.
Gottlieb, who has been president and CEO since 2010, will remain at the helm for the next several months, and told The Boston Globe regarding the settlement: “I’m the final word around that.’’
Partners In Health, which Gottlieb will join as CEO effective July 1, 2015, is a different type of juggernaut. Co-founded by Dr. Paul Farmer in 1987, PIH originally set out to bring health care to mountainous regions of Haiti; its sister organization, Zanmi Lasante, is now the largest nongovernmental health-care provider in Haiti, serving some 1.3 million people with a staff of 5,400 Haitians.
PIH has since expanded to other nations where poverty limited access to medical treatment: from Peru and Mexico to Rwanda, Russia, and even the United States, where PIH helps serve members of the Navajo Nation who face chronic disease.
In recent weeks, as Ebola has dominated the news, Farmer has spoken out about the need to assist poverty-stricken nations such as Liberia improve their health systems.
“[T]he fact is,’’ he wrote in the London Review of Books after a visit to Liberia, “that weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence or a previously unknown mode of transmission, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread.’’
Gottlieb—who is also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and already serves on the board of Partners In Health—echoed Farmer’s views in a statement sent to Partners HealthCare employees about his new position: “The importance of building great health care systems across the globe has been magnified by the tragedy of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, where inadequate medical services now imperil entire nations,’’ he wrote.
“Gary is a dream come true,’’ Farmer said in the release. “He weds deep affection for PIH—through many trips to Haiti and Rwanda, but also as a board member and the former or current boss of scores of our volunteers from Harvard’s teaching hospitals—with the sort of management and clinical skills needed to bring PIH to the next level. There’s no place from which to see this more clearly than West Africa right now.’’
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