OhioHealth CEO Stephen Markovich Shares 2025 Plans With The Columbus Dispatch

The Columbus Dispatch sat down with the four chief executive officers of central Ohio’s largest hospital systems to discuss top healthcare topics, past accomplishments within the systems and plans to look forward to in the new year. OhioHealth CEO Stephen Markovich, MD, spoke on a variety of topics discussed including expansion projects, artificial intelligences, women’s health, financial costs for patients, health disparities by race and gender in the region and workforce shortages.

According to the Dispatch journalist, Samantha Hendrickson, “Ohio boasts some of the starkest health disparities by race, gender and more in the country, ranking 44 out of the 50 states for health value, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio. There’s a slew of problems too big for one health system to solve, so despite being competitors, the CEOs still share a table on occasion to try to tackle these issues as part of the Central Ohio Hospital Council.”

The Dispatch asked Dr. Markovich what OhioHealth’s biggest accomplishments this past year were. He shared that this year marks 133 years of providing exceptional high-quality care to patients and their families.

Other accomplishments shared were the opening of the OhioHealth Pickerington Methodist Hospital, a new ambulatory site in Jerome Township, Franklin, Marion and Circle, maturing the relationship with Van Wert (Hospital) and OhioHealth Southeastern Medical Center. Morrow County Hospital is also joining the OhioHealth family next year. Another large project in the works is the revitalization of OhioHealth Grant Medical Center. OhioHealth has had a strong year with physician recruitment and has added 600 to 700 nurses across the organization.

“Underlying all that, we continue to be economically very stable. This is a time when 50% of the hospitals in Ohio are operating in the red. We largely pay for the things that we want to do, like the work at Grant (Medical Center), the work at Riverside (Methodist Hospital), we’re going to build a new tower at Dublin (Methodist Hospital.) We self-finance all that. We want to make sure that we’re a financially stable organization, because 35,000 people, associates, physicians, volunteers, those people count on us for a paycheck every two weeks, and so that financial stability is really important. All in all, a great year,” Dr. Markovich told the Dispatch journalist.

OhioHealth is in 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties now. Dr. Markovich has hopes for the new year of continuing the trajectory the organization is on now.

Dr. Markovich explained to Hendrickson, “We’ve got a big effort going on around what we call becoming a stronger, high-reliability organization. We are going through a very formal process to educate our entire workforce in terms of new processes, new techniques, things that we can do to help make sure that every patient gets a great outcome and has a great experience.”

For the full interview, click on the icon below.