Dr. Marc Gorelick plans to retire this summer as chief executive of Children’s Minnesota following a seven-year tenure that included guiding the state’s largest pediatric hospital through the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd within two miles of the health system’s headquarters.
Gorelick intends to retire in July, when he will be 63. The board of directors at Children’s has initiated a search for a new chief executive, and Gorelick intends to lead the organization until his successor is in place.
In an interview, Gorelick said his current contract runs through May 2026, at which point Children’s will be in the middle of a complex IT installation of a new electronic health record system — a difficult transition that shouldn’t be complicated, he said, by a CEO transition, as well.
“I had to decide whether I wanted to try to extend [my contract] further, or move up my retirement plan to accommodate somebody else coming in and being able to take that project through,” he said. “I thought this was a good time to do the latter.”
Like other medical centers in the Twin Cities, Children’s Minnesota announced job cuts in 2020 followed by shifts in the mix of services between its campuses in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as the health system saw diminished demand for patient care at the outset of the pandemic as well as the impact from a long-term decline in the state’s birthrate.
In 2022, Children’s Minnesota opened an inpatient mental health unit amid deepening concerns over access to behavioral and psychiatric care for kids across the state.
On Thursday, the health system in a news release credited Gorelick with making the executive team and overall workforce more diverse as Children’s became a founding member of the Minnesota Business Coalition for Racial Equity. Gorelick appointed the first-ever chief equity and inclusion officer at Children’s.
The health system’s corporate office and inpatient facility in south Minneapolis is located about 1.5 miles north of where Floyd was killed in May 2020.