By Joan Vennochi,
FROM A business perspective, Partners needs a new face, a new voice, and most of all, a new attitude.
That’s why Kate Walsh’s name comes up as a potential candidate to succeed Gary Gottlieb, Partners’s outgoing CEO. Walsh, the current president and CEO of Boston Medical Center, is known as a fearless and independent leader who is passionately committed to BMC’s mission — serving the city’s most needy.
Choosing someone like that to head the state’s largest health care network would send a powerful message about Partners’s reconfigured priorities.
It would also be precedent-setting. The Partners’s CEO job has always been held by a male physician — and Walsh is neither. This break with tradition could be just what the doctor ordered.
The institution is at a pivot point, as it awaits approval of an agreement with the state attorney general that would limit future price increases while allowing it to add South Shore Hospital and the Hallmark Health hospitals in Melrose and Medford to its network. The grueling process has not been good for the Partners brand.
Instead of focusing on the undisputed excellence of medical care and research at Partners hospitals, ongoing headlines suggest a power grab by arrogant bullies who want to dominate a market. That kind of aggressiveness plays well on Wall Street, but feels unseemly in what used to be the genteel world of nonprofit health care. Whether or not a judge gives the go-ahead, Partners has some serious image-rebuilding ahead.
Of course, the current Partners management team doesn’t see it that way; in their view, rival hospitals who are challenging their merger plans are the bullies. But this time, Partners is losing the PR battle.
The network was created 20 years ago when Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospital joined forces. It now includes McLean Hospital, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, a network of affiliated physicians, and a chain of community hospitals. Over the years, the growing market share stirred competitor grumbling, and the state and Justice Department spent several years investigating Partners for possible anti-trust violations. Then came last summer’s agreement with the AG. In response, rivals formed a coalition to challenge Partners and won backing from the state’s Health Policy Commission, which questioned the ability of the agreement to hold the line on costs.
Last month, Gottlieb, a psychiatrist with an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School,announced he was leaving the CEO’s post as of July 1. Likely successors — all doctors — are said to include Peter Slavin, president of Mass. General; David Torchiana, head of the Mass. General doctors group; and Betsy Nabel, president of Brigham and Women’s.
In Boston’s tight health care community, Walsh’s name comes up as an intriguing alternative. Before taking the BMC job in 2010, she was executive vice president and chief operating officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — where she worked with Gottlieb, then Brigham’s CEO. According to a Boston Business Journal profile, Walsh “fell in love with urban health care as a student at Yale University” and began her health care career as a summer intern at Brookside Health Center in Jamaica Plain. The daughter of a Brookline police officer, she was the first in her family to go to college. She has a B.A. and master’s degree in public health from Yale.
Last May she told Suffolk University graduates, “If you build your career with wisdom and hard work; and you build your life with care and commitment, you won’t have a perfect life, but you will live the life you are entitled to.” That’s good advice for Partners, too.
By all accounts, Walsh would not stand for being window-dressing. She represents true change — just what the business side of Partners needs from its next CEO.
