Sejal Hathi, director of the Oregon Health Authority, is stepping down Aug. 1.

Gov. Tina Kotek announced the “leadership transition” Thursday morning. “Sejal Hathi has decided to step down from her position as director to focus on family, personal priorities, and the next chapter of life and service,” Kotek’s office said.

Former Oregon Department of Human Services director Fariborz Pakseresht will begin as interim director of the OHA on July 6, at which point Kotek says he will “collaborate with Dr. Hathi on a thoughtful transition.”

The OHA is a major agency. Powered by a $20 billion-plus annual budget, its responsibilities range from public health coordination to regulating hospitals to managing Oregon State Hospital, the state’s highest-level psychiatric institution. It also runs the Oregon Health Plan, which provides health benefits to 1 in 3 Oregonians.

Hathi began her tenure heading OHA in 2024. She was in her early 30s, bearing a résumé filled with prestigious institutions from Massachusetts General Hospital to Stanford University to the White House. She served briefly as a deputy health commissioner in New Jersey before Kotek brought her to Oregon.

“We all had very high hopes that she would bring innovation and compelling policies and ideas and relationships,” Lines for Life CEO Dwight Holton said by phone Thursday morning. But “it just didn’t play out.”

Holton added that there was a “very strong need for the governor to make the change,” and he was glad the reins were going to a steady hand—Pakseresht—who knows the state well.

In a 9 am email to OHA staff, Kotek framed the separation as Hathi’s decision and thanked her for “her steady work to strengthen health care and Oregon’s public health system during her time with us.” Four minutes later, Hathi delivered a note of her own.

“I am proud of what we have advanced together,” she wrote, citing the agency’s work expanding health care coverage, including by widening eligibility for Oregon Health Plan benefits, and establishing the West Coast Health Alliance, a response to changing Trump administration vaccine policies. She also touted the agency’s work expanding residential behavioral health capacity, and “working to stabilize and prepare Oregon’s Medicaid program amid seismic federal change.”

Hathi faced substantive challenges. Oregon’s primary care wait times are long. Its mental health outcomes rank among the worst in the nation. Health care costs are skyrocketing. And she did not always take accountability when things went sideways on her watch.

Oregon State Hospital, the state’s highest-level psychiatric institution, has faced much scrutiny in recent years over staffing problems, questionable caretaking practices, and a high-profile patient death—and, it has churned through interim leader after interim leader, including under Hathi. In a recent hearing before lawmakers, Hathi tried to distance herself from the hospital’s problems, saying they were “confusing to all of us,” and insisting the operation was shaping up.

And despite Hathi’s publicized listening tours, some questioned early on whether Oregon had her full attention. Confusion and skepticism abounded when, in late 2024, she accepted an unpaid job at Stanford University Hospital—outside work she said she would complete in her free time.

In recent weeks, her national profile rose when she penned a New York Times opinion piece describing her challenges getting adequate health care after giving birth to her child—drawing a response letter from an Oregon primary group noting core aspects of an alternative health care model Hathi proposed already exist in the state, but could use more support from the health authority.

Hathi’s departure adds an interesting wrinkle to Portland’s civic anxiety over the fate of the Trail Blazers basketball team. Her husband, Sheel Tyle, owns a portion of the team and has presented himself as the local stakeholder in the Blazers, even as its majority owner, Texas billionaire Tom Dundon, plays a high-stakes game of chicken with the Portland City Council over public funding for an arena overhaul.

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