The leaders of two notable health systems have been named to the board of directors of the healthcare division of General Electric Co. as the parent prepares to spin out that group as part of a longer-range streamlining.
The 10-member board of the healthcare group will include Rodney Hochman, president and CEO of the Seattle-based, Catholic not-for-profit system Providence Health, and Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Tomislav Mihaljevic. Providence runs 52 hospitals and more than 1,000 other sites of care in five Western states, employing 120,000 people, while the Cleveland Clinic system comprises 22 hospitals—including in London and the Abu Dhabi—and is home to more than 72,000 people.
Hochman has led Providence since 2016 and before that led its predecessor organization, which merged with St. Joseph Health. He also has led Swedish Medical Center and is a past chair of boards of the American Hospital Association and Catholic Health Association. Mihaljevic has been leader of Cleveland Clinic since 2018, when he took over after having led its Abu Dhabi hospital. He has been a director of GE proper since this spring, a move made with the upcoming spinoff in mind, and also is co-chairman of the board of directors of the U.S.-UAE Business Council.
The separation of what will be formally called GE Healthcare Technologies Inc. into a stand-alone company is expected to be completed in January and will be followed in about a year by the spin-out of GE’s energy and power business, leaving the legacy GE to focus on aviation work. The GE Healthcare business in 2021 produced operating profits of $2.8 billion on revenues of nearly $17.6 billion. About half of its sales are recurring and the business is organized into units focused on imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions (such monitoring and maternal infant care) and pharmaceutical diagnostics. It employs about 51,000 people around the world, roughly 7,000 of them in the United States and Canada.
Joining Hochman and Mihaljevic on the board of GE Healthcare are:
• Peter Arduini, president and CEO of GE’s healthcare business since January of this year and former leader of Integra LifeScience for nearly a decade
• GE Chairman and CEO Larry Culp, who will be executive chairman and who was recently also named CEO of GE Aerospace
• Lloyd Howell Jr., CFO and treasurer of consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Co. since 2016
• Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, a GE director since 2017 and former CEO of the healthcare-focused Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from 2003 to 2017 and, until last year, a long-serving professor at the University of Pennsylvania
• Catherine Lesjak, a former senior HP Inc. executive who has served on GE’s board since 2019
• Anne Madden, general counsel of Honeywell International Inc. since 2017 and before that the conglomerate’s vice president of corporate development and global head of M&A
• William Stromberg, who last year retired as CEO of investment management firm T. Rowe Price Group Inc., where he had worked since 1987
• Phoebe Yang, who was general manager of Amazon Web Services’ healthcare group until last month and before that was chief strategy officer for population health at Ascension Health and managing director of Ascension Holdings International. She also is a director of digital healthcare platform Doximity and CommonSpirit Health and used to sit on the board of what is today Providence.
Following the expected January spinoff, GE will retain 19.9% of GE Healthcare. Shares of GE (Ticker: GE) were changing hands around $69 on Oct. 17 and have lost about 23 percent of their value over the past six months.
