[T]he president and chief executive officer of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system will retire June 30.
Dr. James Weinstein, 66, has been with the hospital system since 1996 and has held his current role since 2011. He told the board of trustees in 2015 that he would be leaving the post, according to a press release.
Weinstein will remain a professor at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine and keep his academic and clinical positions at the Geisel Department of Orthopedics, the press release said.
He will also keep working with several national initiatives: the High Value Health Care Collaborative, the National Academy of Medicine Board for Population Health, and the Department of Veterans Affairs Special Medical Advisory Group.
Under Weinstein’s leadership, the hospital sued the state of Vermont, claiming that the state unconstitutionally pays the University of Vermont Medical Center about $11 million more per year for the same services that Dartmouth-Hitchcock provides.
Most recently, the hospital ran an unexpected $12 million deficit in the fiscal year that ran from 2015 to 2016, and posted a $22 million operating loss in the quarter that ended June 30.
The hospital system said in September it would lay off up to 460 workers, mainly at its flagship hospital, in order to fix its financial problems. By October, the number of people to be laid off dropped to 84.
In an email to employees, Weinstein called his job “an incredible privilege.” He said the hospital is “on a good path, and now is the right time to transition to a new leader who will apply his or her vision and energy to the tasks before us.”
Anne-Lee Verville, the chair of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Boards, said the board has “great admiration and appreciation” for Weinstein’s work, including as President of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, Director of the Dartmouth Institute, and the Chair of the Department of Orthopaedics.
Dr. Denis Cortese, the former president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic who sits on the Dartmouth-Hitchcock board of trustees, called Weinstein “a visionary and transformative leader not just for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health system, but nationally, as we seek to reform a broken health care system.”
Dartmouth-Hitchcock gets 40 percent of its patients from Vermont. In the past year, the CEOs of four other Vermont hospitals have either left or announced they would leave their jobs.
