The CEO of Utah’s largest hospital system has announced plans to step down.
Dr. Marc Harrison will step down this fall as the president and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, a leadership position he has held since 2016, the company said in a statement Thursday. Intermountain Healthcare is based in Salt Lake City and has about 42,000 Utah employees.
Harrison is leaving Intermountain Healthcare for a leadership position to run a health care platform for the venture capital firm General Catalyst, according to the statement.
Prior to his time as CEO of Intermountain Healthcare, Harrison worked for Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, but even then, he already had a history in the Salt Lake City area: He and his wife moved to Utah in 1990, where they both worked at Primary Children’s Hospital — he as an intern, and she as a resident. He joined the Cleveland Clinic in 1999 as a pediatric intensive care doctor, and moved through the ranks over the years.
In 2016, Harrison said he wasn’t looking for a new job when he received the offer to run the same system where his career started. But he couldn’t pass it up, he told The Salt Lake Tribune at the time, noting that the system’s commitment “to keeping care affordable is really extraordinary.”
“Marc has helped spur innovation across our organization during his six-year tenure. We are better today because of his outstanding leadership,” the chair of the Intermountain Healthcare Board, former Governor of Utah Mike Leavitt, said in a statement.
The nonprofit’s board plans to find a temporary replacement for Harrison as it seeks its next CEO. In 2019, Harrison reported a total compensation of about $2.9 million in his role, according to financial documents posted on Propublica’s Nonprofit Explorer tool.
Harrison had a form of blood cancer that left him immunocompromised, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, he has urged Utahns to get vaccinated to protect him and others with similar conditions.
After a bone marrow transplant and experimental CAR T-cell therapy, his cancer has been in remission, The Tribune reported last year. An avid triathlon participant, Harrison didn’t let a previous diagnosis of bladder cancer stop him from racing, he shared in 2016.
Intermountain Healthcare merged with Colorado-based SCL Health in April to form a network that the company said in an announcement comprises of 59,000 caregivers and 33 hospitals across seven states.
Leto Sapunar is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
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