UIHC searching for new Downtown Campus, Children’s Hospital leadership

cigaretteman · Mar 21, 2024

Deborah Berini was hired in December to lead UIHC's integration with the former Mercy Iowa City campus.
She is leaving UIHC May 10 to become president for SSM Health’s DePaul Hospital in St. Louis.
UIHC is launching a search for a permanent chief administrative officer of its Mercy campus, which is called the Downtown Campus.
The hospital is still in the "exploratory phase" for planning the future of the Downtown Campus.
At the same time, UIHC is conducting a search for a new chief administrative officer at Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

IOWA CITY — Three months after hiring a leader for its complex integration with Mercy Iowa City, University of Iowa Health Care this week announced she has accepted another job and will be leaving in May — compelling UIHC to initiate a search for a permanent chief administrator of its new Downtown Campus.

Deborah Berini, former president of Penn State Health’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, in December signed a one-year agreement to serve as UIHC chief integration officer and interim chief administrative officer of the former Mercy Iowa City campus — which UIHC rebranded its “Downtown Campus" after buying it in a bankruptcy auction for $28 million in November.

Had Berini — through her Pennsylvania-based Berini Consulting Group — stayed with UIHC through the agreement’s duration of Jan. 1, 2025, she would have earned $780,000 on the year.

Given her last day with the university will be May 10, Berini at a monthly rate of $65,000 will have earned more than $260,000 over her four-plus months helping to bring into the UIHC system about 1,000 former Mercy employees and 192 beds housed in facilities just two miles east of the main UIHC campus.

Berini’s contract with UIHC allowed her to terminate the deal after May 1 — so long as she gave 30 days notice. In announcing her departure, UIHC reported Berini has accepted the job of president for SSM Health’s DePaul Hospital in St. Louis.

SSM Health calls itself one of the largest integrated health systems in the nation, with 23 hospitals, more than 40,000 employees, and more than 163,411 inpatient admissions annually.

DePaul Hospital-St. Louis is a 523-bed general acute care hospital. With UIHC’s new 194 beds from the former Mercy site, plus the additional employees, it boasts 1,083 inpatient beds and nearly 20,000 employees.

Those numbers will grow once UIHC opens its new $525.6 million, 469,000-square-foot hospital campus in North Liberty next year — providing another 36 inpatient beds. Additionally, UIHC is planning a new $1 billion inpatient tower on its main Iowa City campus featuring multiple floors of 48 beds each.

Downtown campus future

With Berini’s departure, UIHC is launching a search for a permanent chief administrative officer of its downtown campus — which has maintained Mercy’s patient services during the transition.

“We needed an interim leader to help provide a smooth transition for employees, providers, and patients,” UI Hospitals and Clinics Chief Operating Offcier Emily Blomberg said in a Q&A published this week.

Now that UIHC has successfully maintained patient care and services through the transition, Blomberg said, "We see a permanent chief administrative officer for the downtown campus playing an important role in leading future phases.“

As for UIHC’s long-term vision for the former Mercy site, Blomberg and UIHC CEO Brad Haws said that’s evolving.

"We’re still in an exploratory phase when it comes to planning for downtown campus,“ Blomberg said.

Part of that is because, Haws said, “adding the downtown campus to our system was not part of the strategic plan.” The opportunity arose, he said, and UIHC was glad to be able to maintain patient access and jobs.

“We are very much in an exploratory phase, where every aspect of the downtown campus is being examined,” he said. “There are many things to be determined for the future, but right now we’re listening and we’re learning.”

In Haws’ recent Q&A published by UI Health Care, he stressed a “normal” time frame for absorbing another hospital is years — not months.

“We accomplished this in about 60 working days,” he said. “So we still have a lot of work to do as a team to set our strategic goals and vision as a system.”

In addition to the heavy lift of moving Mercy onto Epic — UIHC’s electronic medical record provider — the university is conducting an extensive evaluation of “everything from capacity needs to equipment to staffing, systems, processes, and more.”

Using a “full facilities and equipment assessment” to guide “decisions and priorities for the downtown campus and clinics from a structural standpoint,” Haws said teams are assessing each property to better understand what needs fixing and what's in good condition.

“The team is also assessing the spaces from a capacity planning perspective to understand what possibilities exist.”

Children’s Hospital search

Although UIHC didn’t give a specific timeline regarding its search for a new Downtown Campus leader, Blomberg said, “The job will be posted soon.”

“We would like to fill the position with a permanent leader as soon as possible,” a UIHC spokeswoman said in response to The Gazette’s question about whether another interim might be necessary.

That search comes as UIHC engages in a separate nationwide hunt for a new chief administrative officer atop its Stead Family Children’s Hospital. The university posted that job Feb. 29 to replace Pamela Johnson-Carlson — who left more than a year ago in January 2023 to become chief nursing officer at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Johnson-Carlson, making $426,703, joined UI Health Care in April 2020 and in December of that year added onto her responsibilities for a stint those of interim chief nurse executive.

Since her departure, Melissa Whisler has been serving as interim chief administrative officer of the Children’s Hospital and will continue in that capacity until a permanent hire comes in.