A veteran hospital executive who helped redraw the state’s health care landscape is preparing to step down.
Kevin Tabb, the chief executive of Beth Israel Lahey Health, said Wednesday that he will leave his job next year, after more than 15 years in the post. Tabb said he made his decision because the hospital system is on stable financial footing with a clear plan for the future.
“It’s time for me to move aside and let somebody else do it,” Tabb told WBUR.
Tabb arrived in Boston in 2011, after a career at Stanford’s hospital system, to run a teaching hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He led the 2019 merger of that hospital and the former Lahey Clinic to create a new health system — now the state’s second largest. It was intended to serve as a counterweight to the former Partners HealthCare, now known as the Mass General Brigham system.
Tabb’s tenure includes the COVID-19 pandemic, when hospital leaders, doctors and nurses had to navigate how to care for patients during an unprecedented crisis. They feared they would run out of protective face masks for staff and ventilators for keeping patients alive.
“The hospitals came together and helped each other,” Tabb recalled. “I think back on some really wonderful moments in that darkness that I won’t forget.”
More recently, he orchestrated a deal to build a new cancer hospital with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. That hospital is scheduled to open in 2031.
Tabb, 62, said he hasn’t decided what’s next for him. “I don’t intend to go run another hospital,” he said.
Tabb’s success helming a major health care system has come through building strong relationships inside and outside its hospitals, said Ann-Ellen Hornidge, chair of Beth Israel Lahey’s board of trustees.
Hornidge said she will co-lead a search for a new CEO. The process is expected to take eight to 10 months and will include internal and external candidates.
Beth Israel Lahey Health includes 14 hospitals and a workforce of 42,000 people.