Joe Wanner delivered the CEO’s report as a stand-in for his boss during one of Bartlett Regional Hospital’s most recent board meetings. He’ll be doing a lot more of that in the future as the boss himself.
Wanner, current Bartlett’s chief financial officer, was named the hospital’s new permanent CEO effective Sept. 29, according to a press release issued Wednesday. He will replace interim CEO Ian Worden and be the first permanent CEO at the hospital since David Keith resigned last August.
Three finalists were interviewed in late August by the board of directors, with Wanner the only one with previous experience at Bartlett. He was the hospital’s controller from 2011 to 2013, CFO from 2017 to 2018 and returned to CFO position last year.
“The board set out to find a leader with strong financial acumen, commitment to the community, and an ability to build stakeholder relations,” Kenny Solomon-Gross, the board’s president, said in a prepared statement.
The board’s vote to select Wanner was unanimous, Solomon-Gross said.
“It’s always rewarding to promote from within the organization and we believe Mr. Wanner is the right person to lead us forward,” he said.
Worden has agreed to stay at the hospital until the end of the year to help with the transition, according to hospital officials.
Bartlett has experienced leadership turmoil with several CEOs since 2021, along with other changes in top leadership, and the hospital is also undergoing financial struggles with Wanner reporting losses of about $1 million a month since the summer of 2020. The hospital is now undergoing an extensive restructuring of its programs and finances in an attempt to balance its books, much of which Wanner has been at the center of in recent months.
“You have to take a step back and look at the different pieces of the programs that we’re looking at,” Wanner told the Empire last month during a meet-and-greet when he was being interviewed for the CEO job. “Are they sustainable? Will they be sustainable as a standalone program, or will they need subsidy in perpetuity? And what’s that do to the other programs that we’re almost required to have?”
“So we took that as kind of the basis for our perspective and started looking at each program — which ones were losing significant amounts — and we looked at them. Can we fix the program? Is there any way we can make it profitable, or at least break even? In a lot of instances there was nothing we could do.”
Wanner also said that while his background primarily is as a financial officer “I’ve been at the elbow of CEOs for the last decade so I understand what the role takes.”
He departed Bartlett twice for jobs at Wallowa County Health Care District in Enterprise, Oregon — first as its CFO between 2013 and 2017, then as its CFO and chief operating officer between 2018 and 2023.
“I bought a home here and moved my family here…this is now our home,” Wanner said when asked about the concern expressed by Bartlett employees about leadership stability at the hospital.
Recruitment of a new CFO will begin during the coming weeks, according to the hospital’s press release.
The other finalists were Melanee Tiura, current administrator of Providence Valdez Medical Center, and Jon Friedenberg, a healthcare consultant with his own Dallas-based Friedenberg Healthcare Consulting.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
