Building Stanford Medicine Together

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back! I hope you enjoyed the July Fourth weekend. Last week I was on a brief overseas visit for Stanford business and today I am glad to be back on campus to extend a warm welcome to David Entwistle, the new president and chief executive officer of Stanford Health Care (SHC).

David comes to us at an exciting time in biomedicine and in the life of our organization. We in Stanford Medicine stand uniquely poised to drive a fundamental shift toward more proactive and personalized health care. This bold transformation will require coordinated efforts spanning our mission areas, and I am pleased at how much progress we have made in creating a more integrated Stanford Medicine.

Much of the credit for recent progress goes to Mariann Byerwalter. During the past six months, Mariann has served as SHC interim president and chief executive officer, though her contributions to Stanford Medicine have spanned decades. Mariann; Christopher Dawes, president and chief executive officer of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford (LPCH) and Stanford Children’s Health; and I established an Integrated Clinical Strategy Committee to promote strategic alignment. Co-chaired by Radiology Chair Sam Gambhir, SHC Chief Operating Officer James Hereford, and LPCH Chief Medical Officer Denny Lund, the committee has enthusiastically affirmed that the components of our tripartite mission are inextricably linked.

Across Stanford Medicine, we are seeing the benefits of increased mission and organization alignment. Take one example: in Stanford Health Care, physician leaders are now paired with administrative leaders. Sharing a common mission, vision, and values, these leadership dyads together establish priorities, and together share accountability for achieving these priorities. Throughout Stanford Medicine’s growing clinical network, physician leaders are now driving efforts to enhance the quality and value of the care we provide to our patients.

Mariann is an exceptional leader, and I am most grateful for her partnership and proud of our successes these past months. I am also delighted that we will continue to benefit from her abiding commitment to the academic mission and deep understanding of the Stanford culture through her membership on the board of directors of both Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children’s Health and her leadership of the Stanford Medicine Advisory Council.

We have much to look forward to in the coming months. In the early fall, I will receive the report of the Precision Health Committee chaired by Medicine Chair Bob Harrington. That committee, charged with developing a strategic plan for Precision Health, has identified seven pillars of our vision and is now at work developing priorities and projects for each of these pillars.

As implementation of these plans gets underway, I am pleased to have a partner in David Entwistle, who brings with him a distinguished record of accomplishments and a collaborative spirit. In my conversations with David, it’s clear he deeply values the leadership of our faculty physicians and is committed to our integrated and tripartite mission. Together, David, Christopher Dawes, and I look forward to promoting our vision of proactive and personalized health care and to facilitating the collaborations and integration that will be necessary for our ongoing future success.

With best wishes,

Lloyd Minor

Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the School of Medicine
Professor of Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery
Professor of Bioengineering and of Neurobiology, by courtesy