Massini announces executive leadership changes

For well over a year, we’ve talked at our town halls and other venues about the work underway to ensure Penn State Health is well-positioned to care for our community for generations to come. We need the right people, the right structure and infrastructure, and the right culture – including the ability to adapt as health care changes. We’ve undergone tremendous growth since 2015, and now our focus has shifted to creating a health system that is efficient, consistent, nimble and financially secure.

This past January we engaged Ernst & Young, an internationally-recognized consulting firm, to help us analyze our leadership structure with a goal of identifying ways to improve communication, job clarity, efficiency, cost effectiveness and our ability to make important decisions quickly. Ernst & Young provided an outside perspective on how our leadership structure is currently organized, our reporting relationships, how we compare to industry-leading practices and where we have opportunities to improve. That assessment is complete, and we are now using those insights to determine how to improve our leadership structure.

Here are some of the earliest changes we’ve made within our executive team:

• Deborah Addo will now serve as president and chief operating officer of the health system to more adequately reflect her full breadth of operational responsibilities across hospital service lines and Penn State Health Medical Group.
• Hospital presidents will continue to report to Deborah, and she’ll now also oversee our Medical Group. This change is to achieve alignment and synergies between our outpatient practices, hospitals and patient flow structures.
• As part of our endeavors to streamline our organization, we created systemwide clinical service lines to ensure our patients have the same high-quality, seamless experience and access to care no matter where they enter our health system. Some of the service lines have dual administrative and physician leaders; some have only a physician leader. Administrative leaders will report to Deborah, and for their service line responsibilities, the physician leaders will report to Dr. Kenneth Wood, our new chief medical officer.
• Deborah will also oversee our Center for Operational Excellence so that we can better promote tools and expertise across Penn State Health. Operational Excellence is currently a department within Hershey Medical Center and assists with some system projects. It will now be a full system department to support all our efforts as needed.
• Wood will oversee our Health System Operation Command Center to create consistencies for patient movement across Penn State Health. Dr. Wood will also be the point person in Penn State Health to ensure that we are working collaboratively with Penn State College of Medicine to advance clinical research and help deliver its educational mission of training the next generation of physicians and health care professionals.
• Tom Stoessel will continue to oversee all our system strategy work, which is critically important as we navigate the ever-changing health care landscape. He will continue to advance the transformation work, including the growth of our virtual health platforms and services, and lead mergers and acquisitions along with his ongoing oversight of our Marketing and Communications function.

More changes will unfold throughout 2023 and 2024, and the vast majority will focus on our leadership and management structures, meaning that the impact to our non-leadership staff will pertain mostly to changing reporting structures. This optimization of Penn State Health is an important next step in our strategic journey to deliver the care and experience our patients want and deserve.

As we move forward, know that our RITE values of Respect, Integrity, Teamwork and Excellence will drive everything we do. In cases where creating more efficient reporting structures results in eliminating leadership roles, we will make every effort to move affected individuals into new roles. If there is no appropriate new role, we will take care of our people – as we always do – by supporting them through their transition out of the organization with severance packages and additional transition support services.

Our organization grew quickly out of necessity. Now is the time to assess and optimize our leadership structures. These changes underway are being made carefully, thoughtfully and strategically, focused on achieving our mission to improve health and our vision to be Pennsylvania’s most trusted health care provider. Your support and patience will be critical to the success of this effort.

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