Fairview Health Services is adding three senior executives and has made big changes to its board of directors following its June merger with St. Paul-based HealthEast.
The Minneapolis health system said Tuesday that a hospital executive and a physician have relocated from Northern California to take the positions of chief operating officer and chief medical officer, while an executive has come from Wisconsin to serve as chief nursing executive.
Fairview also announced that eight new directors have been named this year to the health system's 19-person board. The tally includes three HealthEast board members who were given director positions at Fairview as part of the merger agreement.
"This was an intentional move to cultivate a board with the skills needed to advance care in one of the most comprehensive and geographically accessible health systems in the state," Fairview said in a statement. "As we've added capabilities to our health system, we evolved our board as well."
M. Osman Akhtar, who was the vice president of operational integration for Sacramento-based Sutter Health, is Fairview's new chief operating officer, while Dr. Mark Welton, a professor of surgery at Stanford University, is the chief medical officer.
Both will report directly to James Hereford, who became Fairview's chief executive last year and previously worked at California-based Stanford Health Care.
Laura Reed has been named chief nursing executive, a new position that also reports directly to Hereford. Reed comes from Wisconsin-based ThedaCare health system, which previously employed Kathryn Correia, the former HealthEast chief executive who is now Fairview's chief administrative officer.
Fairview is one of the state's largest operators of hospitals and clinics, including the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis and Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina. The nonprofit employs 32,000 people.
The HealthEast merger added three acute care hospitals and 14 clinics to the Fairview system. Judging by state Health Department figures from 2015, the combined system has more available hospital beds than any other health care system in Minnesota including Allina, the Mayo Clinic and HealthPartners.
Beyond hospitals and clinics, Fairview operates a pharmacy division, several nursing homes and the PreferredOne health insurance company.
In 2016, Fairview had nearly $4.4 billion in operating revenue, while HealthEast had nearly $1 billion in revenue.
Christopher Snowbeck • 612-673-4744
Twitter: @chrissnowbeck
