Kaiser Permanente’s longtime chief executive officer and chairman, George Halvorson, announced Thursday his plans to retire in December 2013. The nonprofit health system that he has helmed since 2002 is beginning a search for his replacement.
In a letter to Kaiser Permanente employees, Halvorson said when he joined the health system, he told the board he’d serve for a decade “because I thought it would take about that long to make the kinds of contributions that I wanted to make” and because he hoped to retire at age 65 to pursue other projects of importance to him – projects that will find him working on diversity issues, he noted. “I definitely feel a calling in that direction and I am no longer young – so if there is a calling there, I need to follow it sooner rather than later,” he wrote in his letter.
According to a press release from the company, during his years at Kaiser Permanente, Halvorson aided in growing the company into one of the country’s largest nonprofit health systems with more than 9 million members and adding seven new hospitals and 180 medical offices and other outpatient facilities. He also championed electronic health records, and helped shape Kaiser Permanente into a company that has become a model for care delivery for the rest of the country’s health industry.
His passion for diversity issues also played a part in his shaping of Kaiser Permanente. As noted in the press release, under Halvorson’s direction, the company received numerous recognitions for diversity, including from the Human Rights Campaign, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Hispanic College Fund, the Minority Counsel Association and Diversity MBA.
Halvorson’s tenure has not been without bumps in the road. Kaiser Permanente has battled with unions and faced strikes, and was rocked by a scandal over its kidney transplant program. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, federal medical inspectors skewered Kaiser Permanente for running the program so poorly that it endangered the lives of more than 1,000 patients.
[See also: Nurses strike at Kaiser facilities. Nurses strike at Kaiser's Sunset Boulevard medical center. Kaiser sues nurses' union.]
“We delivered great care,” Halvorson told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But we delivered really inadequate administrative services. We screwed up and we didn’t know it. It will never happen again.”