Dive Brief:
- Partners Healthcare announced that Dr. David Torchiana will be repacing Dr. Gary Gottleib as CEO of the non-profit organization. Torchiana has been serving as CEO of the Massachusetts General Physician Organization, a subsidiary of Partners.
- The healthcare system has struggled with its foray into health insurance and has faced roadblocks to its attempt to continue expanding. It suffered an operating loss of $21 million last year on revenue of $10.9 billion.
- Torchiana says he plans to improve the organization's financial performance in the coming year and to review their options following last week's court ruling that prevented the hospital from acquiring three Massachusetts community hospitals (and becoming the state's largest system).
Dive Insight:
Torchiana's decision on how to proceed following the blocked acquisition of three hospitals last week will impact the healthcare landscape in Massachusetts. The expansion had been opposed by other health systems and the state's attorney general due to antitrust concerns.
"We understand the message and we got the message very clearly," Torchiana told Modern Healthcare. "We need to step back and we need to look at the different pieces of the issues that were before the judge and before the attorney general and figure out what to do."
In 2012 Partners acquired the managed care company Neighborhood Health Plan, and markets health plans to Medicaid, exchange and commercial consumers. As an insurer, Neighborhood Health Plan covered an estimated 330,300 people in 2014, an increase of 25% from the prior year. But the new enrollees needed more costly care than anticipated, leaving the health plan with a loss that they are attempting to turn around. "It's not a sustainable thing long-term if we can't get it to be fixed," Torchiana said.