Retiring Jefferson CEO Klasko: Healthcare Needs a Greta Thunberg

Oct. 14, 2021
Under Klasko’s leadership, Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health grew from three hospitals to 18

Stephen Klasko, M.D., M.B.A., the iconoclastic CEO of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, who has said that healthcare needs its own Greta Thunberg to promote health equity, will retire from his position effective Dec. 31, 2021.

“We need to ring the fire alarm,” Klasko told the Population Health Colloquium this week. “Like climate change, healthcare inequities represent a worldwide existential crisis, and will require all of us inside and outside health systems to actually work together.”

Under Klasko’s leadership over the past eight years, Jefferson Health has grown from three hospitals to 18 with revenues that grew from $1.5 billion to more than $6.7 billion, annualized. It recently completed a merger with Einstein Healthcare Network. With the pending acquisition of HealthPartners Plans, a health insurer of nearly 250,000 adults and 11,000 children, Jefferson will have grown to approximately $8.1 billion in revenues with more than 45,000 employees, since Klasko joined the health system in June 2013.

Always impatient for more rapid change in health outcomes, Klasko was willing to be critical of all the health systems and universities in Philadelphia, including Jefferson. “You might think that with all these universities and hospitals, it should be a heck of a healthy, productive city. In fact, in 2021, Philadelphia was the poorest city in the United States, with close to 26 percent of its residents living below the poverty line,” he said in a presentation this week to the Population Health Colloquium. “What did that mean to health? We had the highest obesity rates, highest smoking rates, HIV, low-birth-weight babies, and maternal mortality rates of any of the country's 10 major cities. In addition, more than 20 percent of the population of approximately 320,000 people did not have access to affordable, nutritious food. It's almost what we'd expect in a developing country. But it was right here in Philadelphia, with many, many universities and academic medical centers.”

Noting that a patient’s zip code determines too much about their health outcomes, Klasko said Jefferson is determined to make sure members of the region’s underserved communities live healthier, happier, more productive lives and described the launch of the Philadelphia Collaborative for Health Equity and other initiatives to improve care in Philadelphia.

“I am very proud of our blueprint for strategic action that transformed Jefferson’s mission to ‘We Improve Lives’ which led to transformational gifts such as the Frazier Family Coalition Stroke Education and Prevention in North Philadelphia, and the Closing the Gap by zip code initiative in collaboration with Novartis and Temple University,” Klasko said in a statement.

Klasko also oversaw a major investment in telehealth in 2014 to create JeffConnect, one of the largest specialty telehealth services in the nation.

Klasko will remain a special advisor to the Jefferson board of trustees for the innovation and philanthropy pillars through the end of fiscal year 2022. Emeritus Board Trustee H. Richard Haverstick Jr. will serve as interim president and CEO as the board embarks on a national search for Klasko’s successor.

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