Wendy Horton, CEO of the University of Virginia Medical Center, is leaving the flagship hospital of the UVa Health System.
Her exit means that in less than five months all three of UVa Health’s top executives have announced their departures, leaving the top-ranked hospital system in the commonwealth without permanent leadership. And this in the wake of UVa President Jim Ryan’s abrupt resignation last month under pressure from the Trump administration Department of Justice over diversity policies.
Horton plans to leave Charlottesville in early September for San Francisco, where she has been named senior vice president and president of adult care services within the University of California, San Francisco’s health system, UVa Health spokesman Eric Swensen told The Daily Progress Wednesday. The UCSF system supports three main hospitals with close to 1,000 total beds in the Bay Area, specifically in Parnassus, Mission Bay and Pacific Heights.
UVa Health also announced Wednesday that an interim hospital CEO will be named to replace Horton in the near future.
“During her tenure as CEO of the University Medical Center, Wendy Horton has been an enormous driver of and contributor to the growth of our academic medical center as well as helping to progress UVA Health’s ambitious 10-year strategic plan. We wish Dr. Horton all the best as she takes on her exciting new role at UCSF Health. An interim leader soon will be named, with the expectation that the selected candidate will be in place by Dr. Horton’s departure in September,” interim UVa Health CEO Dr. Mitchell Rosner said in a statement.
Rosner himself has served as interim chief executive since the departure of CEO Craig Kent in late February.
Horton, who joined UVa Health as chief operating officer of the UVa Medical Center in April 2020, was a Kent hire, two months into his tenure.
Horton, however, managed to remain relatively unscathed amid the scandal that led to Kent’s resignation and embroiled fellow Kent hire and UVa School of Medicine Dean Dr. Melina Kibbe, whose departure was announced on Monday.
On Monday, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston announced it planned to hire Kibbe and she would officially be named president of the center after a required 21-day waiting period.
Neither Horton’s nor Kibbe’s departures were publicly announced by UVa. Kibbe’s was first announced by her new employer, while Horton’s was noted in an internal UVa memo.
In September of last year, 128 UVa physicians and professors signed a letter of no confidence in Kent and Kibbe’s leadership. They claimed the pair had committed multiple “egregious acts,” including pressuring doctors to fraudulently bill patients and creating a “culture of fear and retaliation.”
Lawyers from the Washington-based firm of Williams & Connolly were brought on to investigate the allegations of criminal and ethical wrongdoing and after six months presented a report to the university’s governing Board of Visitors behind closed doors. The findings of that investigation were never made public, but were enough to prompt Kent’s resignation the same day they were presented to the board.
Before coming to UVa, Horton spent close to three years as a chief administrative officer for the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Her time there overlapped with Kent, who served as dean of the Ohio State University School of Medicine, where he was the target of yet another letter of no confidence.
While Horton wasn’t mentioned in the September letter of no confidence as her colleagues were, her name did come up in conversations regarding Kent’s practice of ignoring standard hiring procedures at UVa. Several of the current and former hospital executives, physicians and professors who spoke to The Daily Progress on the matter claimed Kent installed Horton as CEO without proper consultation or consideration for internal applicants.
Horton is now one of multiple UVa leaders to depart in just the past few years. Outside of Kent, Kibbe and Ryan, Provost Ian Baucom resigned earlier this year after he was named president of Middlebury College in Vermont; Dean of Students Robyn Hadley resigned in August of 2023 in the wake of the year-prior shooting that killed three students on grounds; and basketball coach Tony Bennett resigned last October over his discomfort with the changing landscape of college athletics, specifically the transfer portal and name, image and likeness deals.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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