Because the BCPI Advanced program qualifies as an advanced APM, participants could have access to MACRA’s potential risks and added rewards.
The CMS Innovation Center launched a new voluntary bundled payment model this week, continuing the Trump administration’s purge of mandatory programs from the Obama era.
Although some experts worry optional models could be less effective, proponents say the new program builds on a proven foundation and will help to reorient the market away from a fee-for-service arrangement and toward a truly value-based system.
“Under this model, providers will have an incentive to deliver efficient, high-quality care,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement, noting that this marks the administration’s first advanced alternative payment model (APM).
The Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced (BPCI Advanced) program is an episode payment model authorized by the Affordable Care Act. Because this new iteration of the current BPCI program qualifies as an advanced APM, participants could be eligible for bonus payments under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA).
Avalere Health Vice President Fred Bentley said in a statement that this advanced APM status “creates a powerful incentive for physicians to venture into episodic bundling.” Others who, like Avalere, have been involved in the current version of the program agree.
Carter Paine, MBA, chief operating officer for Nashville-based naviHealth, says the new and improved program is poised to flourish.
“There’s a real blueprint for success now in BPCI, so I think you’re going to see large-scale participation in this voluntary program,” Paine tells HealthLeaders Media.
“From our perspective as a convener, we realized over time who the constituents are within the healthcare ecosystem that we need to influence,” Paine adds. “We figured out where there are, I’d say, pricing or utilization anomalies that we can go affect or intervene on.”
There are 32 clinical episode types in the program. Healthcare organizations that choose to participate will be expected to keep their Medicare costs down while maintaining or improving on quality metrics.
Ashley Thompson, senior vice president for public policy analysis and development for the American Hospital Association, said in a statement that the organization is pleased with the advanced APM status.
"These new models will facilitate hospital-clinician partnerships to provide patients with better, more efficient care," Thompson said. "Additionally, it gives providers new options and opportunities to utilize their investments in moving towards value-based care."
Applications are due by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 12. They must be submitted via the online application portal. The performance period will begin October 1 and run through 2023.
A second application opportunity is planned for January 2020.
Organizations that make the most of BCPI improve more than just their finances, Paine says.
“It leads to more efficient and better quality delivery for the patients that you manage and come through the doors of your hospital,” he says. “So not only is there a financial opportunity to participate in this program, but there’s a better patient care opportunity—which, from a marketing perspective, I think obviously drives more patients back to your own hospital.”
Current leader looking to personally pass the reins to his successor after overseeing years of transformation.
David Bailey, MD, MBA, announced his plans Tuesday to retire, after 13 years as president and CEO of the Nemours Children’s Health System, based in Jacksonville, Fla.
Bailey, who has worked for Nemours more than two decades and been a pediatrician for four, will continue to lead the organization as his successor is selected.
“I look forward to participating in the search for the next CEO as an opportunity to transition what has been my dream, to someone with equal passion for children’s healthcare,” Bailey said in a statement.
Under Bailey’s leadership, Nemours has increased its number of care locations from 15 to more than 80 across Florida and five other states: Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Revenues, meanwhile, have more than doubled, from $533 million to $1.4 billion, the organization said.
Nemours also has launched its own digital health and telemedicine platform—a response to rising eagerness among parents to use telemedicine services on their children’s behalf, as HealthLeaders Media reported last year.
The organization, which is also known as the Nemours Foundation, has undergone some organization changes in recent years as well, with four national health leaders were added to the foundation’s board in fall 2016.
Nemours Board of Directors Chairman Brian Anderson expressed gratitude, in the statement, for Bailey’s service.
“Everything that he has done at Nemours is based on ensuring that we put the child first at all times, that we attract and retain talented physicians and Associates to provide the highest quality care and that the organization is appropriately positioned to successfully deliver on its mission for the future,” Anderson said.
The St. Louis-based health system picks up four hospitals, eight post-acute care centers, and dozens of other facilities, continuing a trend toward consolidation.
SSM Health has expanded its territory farther northeast into the Great Lakes region, announcing Thursday that its acquisition of two more organizations in Wisconsin has been finalized.
The St. Louis-based nonprofit health system now stretches from central Oklahoma to east-central Wisconsin, where it just acquired Agnesian HealthCare, based in Fond du Lac, from the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes (CSA). SSM Health also acquired the CSA-sponsored Monroe Clinic in Monroe, continuing an industrywide trend toward consolidation.
The two acquired health ministries were established more than a century ago by CSA, which initiated talks to transfer their sponsorships, according to SSM Health. The move was motivated, at least in part, by changes in the state’s payer and provider markets.
“This partnership is a natural fit and we look forward to working together to further improve access and enhance quality of care in Wisconsin,” said SSM Health President and CEO Laura S. Kaiser in a statement.
This deal comes as Catholic healthcare organizations are reshaping the industry through large-scale mergers. Last month, Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives punctuated years of negotiations by signing a definitive agreement to merge their operations to form a 139-hospital system. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Ascension and Providence St. Joseph are in merger talks that could form the biggest hospital owner in the country.
SSM Health’s arrangement—plans for which were announced last July—adds to the system’s 2013 acquisition of Madison-based Dean Medical Group, bringing the system’s number of Wisconsin employees to about 14,000, as HealthLeaders Media previously reported. The system said in November that it would cut its workforce by about 1%, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported.
Sister Jean Steffes, the CSA’s general superior, told theJournal that the deal “allows the kind of innovation and ongoing capital investment that we couldn’t do by ourselves,” while retaining “a culture very similar to ours.”
The two newly acquired organizations are each expected to adopt the SSM Health brand—in a way that honors their existing names—by the end of the year
The move could continue to chip away at the Obamacare markets by opening up more options.
Carrying out a directive issued last fall by President Donald Trump, the Labor Department proposed a new rule Thursday to govern association health plans.
Trump has touted these AHPs, which allow small businesses and trade associations to team up in groups that buy health insurance together, as among the many ways his administration will rescue Americans from costly provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Critics worry these alternative options could undermine consumer protections.
If looser restrictions allow for skimpier plans to be made available at lower costs, healthy people would be incentivized to leave the ACA market, increasing risk among the pool left behind, as HealthLeaders Media reported after Trump’s executive order in October.
“The regulation would modify the definition of ‘employer,’ in part, by creating a more flexible ‘commonality of interest’ test for the employer members than the Department of Labor” had previously adopted, the proposed rule states.
The amended definition is needed, the administration says, because current regulations on AHPs are too costly and complex.
Others, however, say the savings aren’t worth the cost. Longtime healthcare consumer lobbyist Beth Capell told Kaiser Health News last month that there was a big push in the 1990s to do away with AHPs after a series of plans had fallen apart and workers suffered.
“They were a bad idea then; they are a bad idea now,” Capell said.
Even so, some see the Trump administration’s move as a worthwhile attempt to help the little guys.
“Large employers often are able to obtain better terms on health insurance for their employees than small employers because of their larger pools of insurable individuals across which they can spread risk and administrative costs,” Trump said in his October executive order. “Expanding access to AHPs can help small businesses overcome this competitive disadvantage by allowing them to group together to self-insure or purchase large group health insurance.”
The rule is set to publish Friday in the Federal Register, with public comments accepted for the next 60 days.
Republican lawmakers celebrated Wednesday afternoon at the White House after passing tax overhaul bill.
President Donald Trump celebrated a tax reform overhaul Wednesday afternoon, marking the first major legislative victory of his tenure exactly 11 months after his inauguration.
Congress finalized its approval of the bill about noon Wednesday with a 224-201 vote in the House after the Senate voted 51-48 along party lines early Wednesday morning. Lawmakers then made a short trek from Capitol Hill to the White House to mark the occasion.
"I hate to say this, but we essentially repealed Obamacare because we got rid of the individual mandate, which was terrible," Trump said, joined on the South Lawn by Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. "And that was a primary source of funding for Obamacare."
The bill includes several other provisions that will impact healthcare organizations in 2018.
The House had already passed the reconciled bill Tuesday, but before the Senate could take the final vote, three items in the bill were deemed to be impermissible under Senate rules. So the Senate removed them, voted in favor of the tweaked final version, and sent it back to the House for another vote.
Democrats in the House lined up Wednesday morning to denounce the tax reform push, citing the need for a re-vote as evidence that Republicans had rushed the process, perhaps even failing to do their due diligence.
“Imagine what other errors we have yet to discover,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Committee on Rules.
The bill eliminates the penalty associated with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, neutralizing a key provision of the Obama-era law Republicans have repeatedly failed this year to repeal. But the final bill also preserves some healthcare-related tax breaks that had been on the chopping block, including the medical expense deduction, orphan drug credit, and private activity bonds for nonprofits.
“Regardless if you’re for or against it, it seems inevitable that the roll back of the individual mandate will result in decreased patient volume across care organizations of all sizes,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said in a statement. “With this in mind, it’s critical for healthcare orgs to revisit their approach to attracting and retaining patients, and of equal import, to reduce the underlying inefficiencies that might be distracting from delivery of the very best healthcare experience.”
Eliminating the individual mandate is projected to increase the uninsured population. What that means for disproportionate share hospitals (DSHs) that rely on payments to cover the costs of otherwise uncompensated care remains to be seen.
There are other items of unfinished business that could affect healthcare organizations in the weeks and months to come:
PAYGO: The Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO, calls for automatic spending cuts when the federal budget deficit is increased. Since the reconciled tax bill is estimated to reduce government revenue by $1.5 trillion, the law is expected to kick in next year, unless Congress steps in to waive the requirement. That waiver would require assistance from the Democrats.
CHIP: After federal funding lapsed in September, lawmakers still haven’t renewed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP. Some states have begun notifying enrollees that their coverage could come to a halt. Democrats brought lumps of coal to a press conference Wednesday to call upon their Republican colleagues to take action in the final days before Christmas.
CSRs: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) had supported the tax reform bill in exchange for a few guarantees from McConnell. Those guarantees included a plan to reinstate the cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments to insurers, which the Trump administration halted. Collins and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday that they have asked McConnell to hold off on that measure until January.
All this comes as lawmakers look to avert a government shutdown that could strike if a funding bill isn’t passed by midnight Friday.
Excise tax on salaries above $1 million could make competing for top talent even more expensive for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
One provision in the GOP’s tax reform bill—which is headed to President Donald Trump’s desk for a signature after the House passed the final version Wednesday morning in a 224-201 vote—will penalize nonprofit healthcare organizations that pay executives seven-figure salaries.
The measure, which imposes a 21% excise tax on compensation above $1 million for each of the five highest-paid employees of a nonprofit organization, promises to overhaul the way large hospitals and health systems compete for top talent. Compensation paid to licensed medical professionals for the performance of medical services is exempt.
It’s relatively common for the top executives of large healthcare nonprofits to make more than $1 million in a given tax year, as a HealthLeaders Media review of recent Form 990 filings with the Internal Revenue Service confirms. Moving forward, those organizations will have to recalibrate their financial priorities.
“It’s going to be a mess to begin with because I suspect most of those executives have employment contracts, and the organization is bound by contract to pay them,” says Gregory B. Lam, JD, managing partner of Copilevitz & Canter’s Kansas City office.
Beyond the hurdles related to existing contracts, affected organizations will likely do one of two things, Lam tells HealthLeaders Media. Either they will pay less and risk losing highly qualified executives to for-profit competitors who can pay more, he says, or they will continue to pay top dollar and incorporate the excise tax into their budgets.
“Or they’ll do a combination of those sorts of things so they try to create a balance yet at the same time not lose talent to the for-profit sector,” Lam adds.
Earlier this month, the National Council of Nonprofits published analysis of the proposed excise tax, which appeared in both the House and Senate version of the bill, suggesting that the change would “bring nonprofit pay rules in line with the for-profit cap on compensation.”
Nonprofit Quarterly’s Michael Wyland echoed that sentiment after the conference committee’s report.
“This change would bring nonprofit salary taxation in line with longstanding tax policy governing for-profit corporations,” Wyland wrote.
What’s ‘Reasonable’?
This excise tax is significant not only because it adds an expense to nonprofit payrolls but also because it renovates the structures that have guarded against excessive compensation for the past two decades.
“It obviously doesn’t preclude payment of that level of compensation, but it changes the historical rules for compensating principles of an exempt organization,” Lam says. “Those rules were always couched in terms of ‘reasonable’ compensation.”
In 1996, Congress enacted the intermediate sanction rules of IRS Code Section 4958. When someone in a key position related to a tax-exempt entity receives what is deemed an “excess benefit,” Section 4958 imposes an excise tax on that person, as Dennis Walsh, CPA, wrote in a primer for the Planned Giving Design Center. (The new excise tax, by contrast, is imposed on the organization rather than the individual.)
“The reasonable value of services is the amount that would ordinarily be paid for like services by like enterprises (whether taxable or tax-exempt) under like circumstances,” Walsh wrote.
In order to guard itself preemptively against accusations of overcompensating its employees, a nonprofit organization can follow a three-step procedure under Section 4958 to establish a “rebuttable presumption” of reasonableness, as Walsh outlined:
An authorized body of the organization, such as a board of directors, must approve the compensation agreement.
The authorized body must gather comparability data and rely upon that data in making its decision.
The authorized body must document the rationale for its decision in a timely and adequate fashion.
The tax reform bill doesn’t remove this process of establishing a rebuttable presumption of reasonableness; it suggests, however, that anything above $1 million is unreasonable insofar as it should be subject to the excise tax.
Multiple healthcare nonprofits that employ top executives who earn more than $1 million annually, according to their IRS filings, declined to comment for this story.
The 21% excise tax is expected to generate $100 million in revenue for the federal budget in 2018 and $1.8 billion over the coming decade, according to an estimate released with the House and Senate conference report.
From a linchpin of the Affordable Care Act to a decades-old drug research tax credit, lawmakers had considered several provisions that would impact healthcare. Not all survived.
The healthcare impacts of the GOP’s tax reform plan came into focus over the weekend after lawmakers from the House and Senate unveiled their reconciled version of the bill Friday evening.
Dire headlines had warned that millions could lose health coverage and hospitals could lose access to low-cost financing options if either chamber’s bill were to become law. The reconciled bill—which is widely expected to pass this week—drew a partial sigh of relief from some industry stakeholders.
Here are four key healthcare-related provisions of the nearly 1,100-page bill:
1. Individual mandate repeal included
The House bill had no provision addressing the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which requires most Americans to pay a tax penalty if they don’t have health insurance. But the Senate’s version had called for the tax penalty to be reduced to zero beginning in 2019—language that made it into the reconciled bill.
The Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimated last month that repealing the individual mandate beginning in 2019 would reap four key outcomes: It would (1) reduce the federal budget deficit by $338 billion over 10 years, (2) reduce the insured population by 4 million in 2019 and 13 million in 2027, (3) maintain the stability of non-group insurance markets in most of the country for the coming decade, and (4) raise premiums by about 10% annually.
2. Medical expense deduction expansion
Although an earlier version of the bill had called for the elimination of the medical expenses deduction, the reconciled bill would temporarily expand it.
Before the ACA, taxpayers who itemize their deductions were able to write off qualifying medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of their adjusted gross income, CNBC’s Sara O’Brien reported. The ACA raised that threshold in 2013 to 10% for people younger than 65, with an expiration date in 2016. The reconciled bill calls for the 7.5% threshold to be applied across all age groups for tax years 2017 and 2018, before returning to 10% for younger Americans in 2019.
But remember, O’Brien notes, that this deduction is available only to taxpayers who itemize their returns and for whom itemizing exceeds the standard deduction. That’s a significant caveat since the standard deduction would nearly double across the board until 2026.
3. Orphan drug tax credit reduction
Companies are currently permitted to write off half of the research costs to develop new drugs for diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people, but the reconciled bill calls for that tax credit to be cut in half, to 25%. Drug companies and patient groups are actually counting this as a partial win, since the House version of the tax bill had called for this credit to be done away with altogether, as Science magazine reported.
4. Private activity bonds preserved
Nonprofit hospitals began sounding the alarms last month when news broke that the House version of the tax bill would scrap tax-exempt bonds. Had the government revoked access to this low-cost financing option, it could have made big-ticket infrastructure projects—such as renovating aging hospital infrastructure or building new—significantly more expensive.
“Protecting hospitals’ access to tax-exempt private-activity bonds means ensuring access to modern facilities that are better able to provide high quality care in thousands of communities across America,” said American Hospital Association President and CEO Rick Pollack in a statement. "A vital source of low-cost capital financing, which helps keep health care more affordable, private-activity bonds are a proven benefit to the public at large and would be preserved under this legislation.”
Healthcare showdown not over
The Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO, calls for automatic spending cuts when the federal budget deficit is increased. Since the reconciled tax bill is estimated to reduce government revenue by $1.5 trillion, the law is expected to kick in next year, unless Congress steps in to waive the requirement.
Democrats have threatened to allow the spending cuts to take effect if Republicans don’t back away from the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate, as Bloomberg reported. In a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Democrats said lawmakers must remove “catalysts of uncertainty” if passing the tax bill triggers PAYGO.
“At a minimum, that must include rejecting the elimination of the individual mandate as well as the use of reconciliation procedures next year for Medicare benefit cuts in order to fill the fiscal gap left by your tax bill,” they wrote.
Latest study is first to find heightened rate of complications among double-booked operations.
In the two years since The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team published its investigation into patient safety concerns arising from concurrent surgeries at Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers have published numerous studies that show no increase in harm to patients when operations overlap.
This month, however, JAMA Internal Medicine published a study online that seems to support the Globe’s line of questioning, which prompted government inquiries and a review by the American College of Surgeons, not to mention heightened public awareness of the practice.
The new study found that complication rates were higher among overlapping hip surgeries than operations done one at a time and that longer durations of overlap were associated with increased risk.
“Currently, this seems to be the first study to show an adverse effect from the practice of overlapping surgery,” Alan Zhang, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California San Francisco, wrote in commentary released with the findings. “Prior studies, including those performed at my institution, have found no association between patient complications and overlapping surgery.”
One thing that differentiates this latest study from earlier reports on the topic is its size, as MinnPost’s Susan Perry noted. The study reviewed records from more than 90,000 hip replacements across some 75 hospitals and tracked patients for a full year after surgery.
“The size, the numbers, the multiple institutions, and the long-term follow-up dwarf any of those other studies,” James Rickert, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and president of the Society for Patient Centered orthopedics, told the Globe.
Medicare billing rules permit overlapping surgeries, as long as the attending surgeon is there for the critical moments, so it’s up to hospitals to decide whether they will allow the practice, as Kaiser Health News reported earlier this year.
“In the name of efficiency, it makes a lot of sense for the surgeon to get to the closing, turn it over to one of the residents or fellows and go to the next room where the opening has already occurred for the next surgery,” Spotlight editor Scott Allen told HealthLeaders Media last year.
“It is easy to understand how that sort of staggering makes sense from an efficiency standpoint and doesn’t jeopardize the patient’s well-being in any way,” he added. “You have people working at their appropriate level of responsibility from start to finish.”
There are two general circumstances in which it could be appropriate for one surgeon to oversee two operations simultaneously, according to ACS guidelines released last year: either (1) when the key elements of one surgery have been completed and the surgeon is no longer needed or (2) when the key elements of one surgery have been completed and the primary surgeon has assigned immediate availability to another surgeon for the procedure.
“The patient needs to be informed in either of these circumstances,” the ACS guidelines state. “The performance of overlapping procedures should not negatively affect the seamless and timely flow of either procedure.”
Payers are grappling with their responses to the opioid crisis. Support for their moves isn’t unanimous.
One of the largest health insurance companies in the U.S. announced new steps Tuesday to combat the opioid epidemic by imposing stricter prescription limits and waiving copays for the overdose-reversing nasal spray Narcan.
Aetna says the changes, which will take effect on New Year’s Day, will remove financial hurdles that currently keep some Americans from accessing and using the life-saving drug.
“Cost is clearly a factor in whether individuals with substance abuse disorder obtain medication that could save them from a fatal overdose,” Harold L. Paz, MD, MS, executive vice president and CMO for Aetna, said Tuesday in a statement. “By eliminating this barrier, we hope to keep our members safe until they are ready to address their addiction.”
Members currently make copayments ranging from $0 to $150 for Narcan, with the average typically landing between $30 and $40, the company says. Those with higher copays have been less likely to fill their Narcan prescriptions.
During the first six months of the year, more than three-quarters (76.7%) of Aetna members with copays above $100 for Narcan didn’t pick up their prescriptions, the company says, citing claims data from IMS Health. This abandonment rate was much lower (46.1%) for Aetna members with copays between $40.01 and $50.
A company spokesperson tells HealthLeaders Media the copay waiver will apply to Aetna’s 4.6 million fully-insured commercial members. That excludes about 13.5 million self-insured medical members, whose copay structure will continue to reflect the current ranges unless and until their self-insured employers decide to incorporate the Narcan copay waiver into their benefits plans, the spokesperson says.
Thom Duddy, spokesperson for Narcan manufacturer ADAPT Pharma, says the company’s pricing model has been transparent and consistent since its launch last year.
“We’ve never raised our price,” Duddy says.
Across all payers, more than a third of prescriptions for the nasal spray already enjoy a $0 copay, according to the company. Nearly 80% of the prescriptions have a copay of $20 or less.
Praise & Criticism
Leo Beletsky, JD, MPH, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, praises Aetna’s effort to make naloxone (the active drug in Narcan) more affordable.
“It is unconscionable that in the middle of a public health emergency, we still have numerous barriers to accessing this lifesaving medication,” Beletsky writes in an email.
Beletsky is less than pleased, however, by the other initiative Aetna announced Tuesday. The company says it will limit opioid prescriptions to a seven-day supply for its 8 million commercial pharmacy members, when members experience acute pain or recover from surgery—a move Beletsky says could do more harm than good.
“Research suggests that needs for post-operative opioid use are highly varied, depending on the procedure and the patient. Those modal needs vary from 3 to 14 days,” Beletsky writes. “I agree that we need to moderate opioid prescribing to align it more closely with what is necessary and appropriate, but across-the-board mandates and limitations of this sort are not driven by evidence and can be counterproductive.”
For its part, Aetna says its seven-day limit is based on research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that found 13.5% of patients who received an opioid prescription for eight days or more were still taking the painkillers one year later. (The figure is 30% for patients who receive opioid prescriptions for 30 days or more.)
What’s more, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) announced its own multi-year initiative Tuesday to tackle the opioids problem in partnership with the Addiction Policy Forum. PhRMA’s expanded policy proposals call for seven-day supply limits on opioid prescriptions for acute pain, with exceptions.
That seven-day initial limit is already law in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a measure last year.
‘Long-Lasting Solutions’
Earlier this year, at least two large pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), CVS Health and Express Scripts, announced coverage limits of their own on new pain pill prescriptions. The moves have come amid public pressure for payers to take some degree of responsibility for the future of the opioid crisis if not its past, as ProPublica reported.
“The challenge in front of us requires that everyone be at the table, working together to implement comprehensive, long-lasting solutions that will save lives,” said Addiction Policy Forum President and CEO Jessica Hulsey Nickel in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with leaders in the biopharmaceutical community to help states, cities, towns and families change the trajectory of this crisis.”
Kevin W. Sowers, who has helmed Duke University Hospital eight years, is set to take over at Johns Hopkins Health System early next year.
Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore announced Monday that a new president has been selected to take over after longtime leader Ronald R. Peterson retires.
Kevin W. Sowers, MSN, RN, FAAN, who has been serving as Duke University Hospital’s president and CEO for the past eight years, will begin his new job with Johns Hopkins on February 1, making him the second person to serve as the system’s president.
Sowers was tapped for the job on account of his demonstrated ability to lead in complex and evolving healthcare environments, said John Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels during a press conference.
"Navigating an ever-changing healthcare landscape and caring for patients and communities in the 21st Century demands a rare combination of strategic planning and the ability to expect—and respond to—the unexpected," Daniels said. "Kevin has proven himself to be that rare leader, as he is someone who can see the future, then put in place the programs, practices, and partnerships necessary to get there."
While Sowers was in Baltimore for the news conference Monday, his current staff learned of his forthcoming departure in an email from Duke University Health System CEO A. Eugene Washington, as the independent Duke news organization The Chronicle reported.
Washington reportedly made the announcement with “mixed emotions,” noting that Sowers has been “an integral part of the cultural fabric” at Duke.
Sowers, who will also serve as executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, has been working for Duke since 1985, when he started out as a staff nurse in oncology. He has since held several faculty positions, served as an international consultant, and established an academic department dedicated to oncology nursing.
Before his time as Duke University Hospital’s president and CEO, Sowers had been its COO and the interim CEO for Durham Regional Hospital, among other senior administrative roles—all of which indicate Sowers will succeed at Johns Hopkins, Peterson said of his successor.
"The combination of Kevin's clinical background, business acumen, and sensitivity to the human condition within the context of an academic medical system bodes well for the future of Johns Hopkins Health System and Johns Hopkins Medicine,” Peterson said.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story misstated one of the titles Sowers will hold with Johns Hopkins. The correct titles are president of the Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine. The story has been updated.