Follow-up to Dr. Kevin Olson announcement

Ben LeBlanc, M.D.
Chief Executive
Providence Physician Enterprise – Oregon

By now you’ve seen the announcement that Kevin Olson, M.D., is assuming a leadership role for Providence Central Division Institutes and Programs.

Since we are not replacing Kevin’s Oregon role, we are making some organizational changes in Oregon. These will make sure we continue moving forward, focusing on our institutes and centers of excellence in collaboration, as we create the best possible patient experience.

First off, I want to let you know that we will be creating two new roles within the Oregon medical group – a chief medical officer of specialty clinics, reporting to me, and an executive director of specialty operations, reporting to Jennifer Zelensky. The creation of this dyad within the medical group will allow us to continue the support of specialty clinics and the focus on institute development.

We are fortunate that Dan Oseran, M.D., executive medical director of our heart institute in Oregon, has agreed to serve as our first interim chief medical officer of specialty clinics.  For the most part, physicians and advance practice clinicians currently in clinical programs will begin reporting through Dan. That said, we understand there are areas of complex integration between acute care and clinical programs, and we will work through those together in the weeks ahead. We will begin recruiting for a permanent specialty CMO as soon as possible.

We will also be recruiting for an executive director of specialty operations.  In the meantime, directors of operations for clinical program clinics will transition to report directly to Jennifer Zelensky. Jennifer will work with the clinical program executives to determine the exact date for these reporting relationships to change.  It is critical that these clinics continue to have a dotted line to clinical programs. This means that while clinic day-to-day operations will now coordinate through the medical group, the relationship and shared decision making with clinical programs will remain.

As noted in Kevin’s announcement, clinical program executives will continue to report to Kevin.

These moves are intended to help us continue our journey towards more integration and synergy across the multispecialty medical group. We have lots of examples of that, from our Wednesday huddles to our joint operations director meetings, the development of a single medical group board, and our specialty advisory groups through the high performing network model.

During this transition, as we establish a new model, we’ll be seeking a lot of input. Working in partnership with you, we’ll want to listen and get your feedback and ideas. This is a partnership, and our goal is to provide the best support for the 7,000 encounters our clinicians across the medical group are having every day.