Kaiser S.F. CEO Mike Alexander to retire
San Francisco Business Times
by Chris Rauber
In the latest apparent fallout from serious problems at Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California kidney transplant unit, Mike Alexander, the CEO of Kaiser’s San Francisco Medical Center, will retire.
Alexander’s decision was detailed in a Kaiser emailed memo issued internally on Wednesday afternoon.
The move came just seven weeks after news accounts in the Los Angeles Times and KPIX TV Channel 5 put the spotlight on serious problems in the San Francisco kidney-transplant unit, including botched paperwork, long delays in matching end-stage kidney patients with transplants and related management issues.
Alexander, a 34-year Kaiser veteran, will leave his position as senior vice president and area manager for Kaiser in San Francisco because of what he described as personal reasons, according to the internal email obtained by the San Francisco Business Times. His resignation was accepted by Mary Ann Thode, Kaiser’s president for Northern California, but will not take effect immediately.
Rick Malaspina, a senior spokesman for Kaiser’s Northern California region, confirmed the information in the email Thursday morning. “He’s not going to be saying anything further, and neither are we,” said Malaspina. He declined to specify if Alexander’s decision to retire, at age 55, had any connection to the San Francisco kidney transplant center’s highly publicized problems.
“It was a personal decision to do this, after a long time here (at Kaiser),” Malaspina said.
Alexander has served as CEO of the San Francisco Medical Center since the spring of 2004. The kidney-transplant unit transferred about 2,000 Kaiser patients from UC San Francisco Medical Center and UC Davis Medical Center transplant waiting lists later that year.
Kaiser’s San Francisco Medical Center also quietly replaced its physician-in-chief in recent weeks. The medical center’s doctors elected Robert Mithun, M.D., to replace Dr. Bruce Blumberg, who presided over the medical staff during the two-year period when problems in the kidney center festered. But a high-level Kaiser source told the Business Times the shift in medical-group leadership was “unrelated” to the kidney fiasco.
Malaspina said Blumberg has been “in transition” to a new role at the San Francisco medical center’s genetics unit for some time. As of late May, however, both Blumberg and Alexander signed a letter to transplant patients informing them about details of plans to transfer them to the non-Kaiser medical centers.
Kaiser is being investigated by several state and federal agencies regarding the kidney-transplant unit, including the state Department of Managed Health Care and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The giant Oakland-based health system agreed to close the troubled unit early last month, after the first news accounts appeared and federal regulators informed it of serious deficiencies in its Northern California kidney program.
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