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A longtime hospital executive at Oregon Health & Science University has lost his job—and the institution says his role has been eliminated.
The leader, Joe Ness, has served for roughly eight years as senior vice president and chief operating officer of OHSU Health, the division that runs the university’s hospitals and clinics. He’d also recently filled in as the health system’s interim CEO.
“I was told that the role was no longer needed, that my areas could be covered by other people,” Ness said in a brief phone interview on Thursday.
OHSU confirmed this afternoon that Joe Ness is no longer the COO of OHSU Health, and says the COO role was eliminated.
“The areas of responsibility are being assigned to other members of the OHSU Health leadership team, including the new chief executive officer, when hired, among others,” spokeswoman Tamara Hargens-Bradley said via email.
The personnel change comes after years of churn among executive leaders at OHSU, which earlier this month got a new president, Dr. Shereef Elnahal, a Harvard-educated physician who has worked as a health care administrator and most recently, according to his LinkedIn page, in venture capital.
Ness worked at the university for well over a decade, and became senior vice president and chief operating officer of OHSU Health in 2018 after having taken on the role in an interim capacity the year prior.
His additional work as interim CEO of OHSU Health began in June 2024, when John Hunter stepped down after seven years at the helm.
Ness “skillfully” balanced the interim CEO job with his COO duties, OHSU said in a December 2024 statement announcing that Ness would continue as COO while Ann Madden Rice would take over as the interim OHSU Health CEO.
Rice ended up leaving five weeks later. The next day, OHSU appointed Tim Goldfarb—who’d run OHSU Health decades prior—to come out of retirement to take the OHSU Health interim CEO position.
The school says it is currently recruiting a new CEO for OHSU Health.
As of October 2023, when WW last requested salaries for OHSU’s top executives, Ness was making $610,183 a year.
According to past OHSU statements, he first joined OHSU Health in 2013, overseeing the hospital’s professional and support services units.
More recently in 2024, OHSU honored him with one of its ”Innovation Awards” for what it said was his work establishing a real-time capacity tracking tool across OHSU.
“This tool provided critical occupancy information that enabled both large health systems and smaller rural hospitals across the state to maximize resources during the early days of the COVID pandemic,” according to a document announcing the award.
