November 19, 2010

AAMC Names UCSF Medical Center CEO Laret Chair-Elect

Mark Laret

Mark Laret, the successful chief executive officer of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, was named chair-elect of the board of directors of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

He will assume the role of chair in November 2011, succeeding Thomas J. Lawley, MD, dean of the Emory University School of Medicine.

Laret is past chair of the AAMC Council of Teaching Hospitals and Health Systems and has served on the board of directors of the University HealthSystem Consortium and Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The last AAMC chair from UC was Julius R. Krevans, former UCSF Chancellor and dean of the School of Medicine, who served from 1980 to 1981.

Laret, who joined UCSF in 2000, is a 30-year veteran of health care management and a national leader in health care initiatives and reform. This year, he was named one of 13 “Most Admired CEOs” by the San Francisco Business Times.

Laret leads a clinical enterprise comprising hospitals and clinics that provide both primary care and highly specialized care at two major sites in San Francisco — Parnassus Heights and Mount Zion — as well as clinics in several other locations. Its services generate about 770,000 patient visits a year and $1.5 billion in annual revenue. The medical center has about 7,000 employees.

Laret is lauded for turning the medical center’s $60 million annual loss into a $70 million annual gain that enabled the self-supporting, nonprofit medical center to pursue expansion and modernization of its facilities and equipment and make advances in quality of care, patient safety and patient satisfaction.

He is spearheading plans to build a $1.5 billion UCSF hospital complex in the Mission Bay, where UCSF last month celebrated the official groundbreaking. Expected to open in 2014, UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay will include hospitals for children, women and cancer patients. Laret has launched a campaign to raise $600 million in private donations for the new facility.

Prior to joining UCSF, Laret served at UCLA Medical Center from 1980 to 1995 in a variety of leadership positions, including medical center deputy director and chief executive officer of the 900-physician UCLA Medical Group. From 1995 to 2000, he was CEO of UC Irvine Medical Center, where he led a business turnaround that resulted in improvements in quality of care, patient satisfaction and financial performance.

Laret earned a bachelor’s degree at UCLA and a master’s degree at the University of Southern California (USC), both in political science.

The AAMC is a not-for-profit association representing all 133 accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools, almost 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems, and about 90 academic and scientific societies.

Related Links: