Dive Brief:
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Dr. Ronald DePinho, who resigned as president of MD Anderson effective March 20, will stay at the center as a professor with a base salary of $795,505 and ancillary pay and benefits that bring the total value to more than $1 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.
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DePinho, who will serve as a cancer biology professor, becomes the third-highest paid professor and will receive an additional $1 million annually to fund research interests.
- Through the course of his tenure as president, operating losses at MD Anderson reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
Dive Insight:
One would be hard-pressed to call DePinho’s 16-month tenure as president at MD Anderson a successful one. The center announced earlier this year that it had sustained losses of $168 million from September 2016 through December 2016 and would lay off about 1,000 employees.
DePinho announced in early March that he would leave the top post at MD Anderson, apologizing for shortcomings and expressing a desire to return to research. "For myself, I need to return to my passion of conducting translational science and helping others doing great science – to drive ideas to clinical impact that matter for patients,” he wrote.
Dr. Marshall Hicks began serving as interim president of MD Anderson on March 21. He had most recently served as division head of diagnostic imaging for the center, a position he had held since 2010.
MD Anderson will establish a committee to search for a permanent replacement for DePinho. For now, Hicks is taking over what some might call a sinking ship. MD Anderson had attributed losses to a costly EHR implementation, but there is likely more at play. Like many health systems, MD Anderson is experiencing a rise in expenses as patient revenues drop.