Exiting Henry Ford Health CEO: Barriers to medical care ‘hold our country back'

Wright Lassiter III knows this country's healthcare system is broken and he wants legislators, insurers and administrators to know it, too.

That's why after six years as the CEO of Henry Ford Health, he's leaving. Lassiter, 58, planned to retire from the Detroit-based health system in a few years, maintaining a life here in the Michigan summer and in Arizona during the winter. But a "once in a career" opportunity to helm the nation's largest nonprofit health system, CommonSpirit Health in Chicago, provides perhaps the biggest megaphone the industry has to offer.

"When you are running a $35 billion organization that is the largest Catholic and largest not-for-profit system (in the country), your voice should be amplified more than others," Lassiter said cross-legged in a media room at Henry Ford headquarters. "I think we have a lot of work to do in healthcare. I would tell you from my point of view, one of the things that's holding this country back — and this is not a political statement from my perspective — is that our country doesn't have access to and rights of health the way that many industrialized countries do. It is one of the impediments that holds our country back from realizing its full economic prosperity, its full success in many ways. Frankly, when you have so many millions of individuals that don't have the luxury of that you and I and our families have, they are not going to be fully productive citizens."

Lassiter often talks in platitudes about transformation and progress, but from his vantage point — he's nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall — progress can be made even within the confines of a broken system.

He looms large in Detroit after just eight years locally (he moved to Michigan from California) assuming a role as one of the city's strongest and most vocal leaders. He's propelled Henry Ford Health toward becoming a true academic health system with aspirations of a destination system like Cleveland Clinic or Michigan Medicine.

He became CEO of Henry Ford officially in January 2017, although he was essentially CEO-in-waiting for two years beginning in September 2014. He quickly focused the integrated health system on partnerships to expand the Henry Ford name.

Accomplishments under Lassiter's leadership include building a major outpatient cancer center on Henry Ford's Detroit campus in New Center and successful negotiations to become the Detroit Pistons' official medical provider and medical manager of a 175,000-square-foot sports performance center.

Last year, Lassiter learned some 3,000 of the system's 33,000 employees were homeless, so he approached the board and raised the minimum wage for all employees to $15 per hour. Costing a little more than $6 million, Lassiter told Crain's the minimum raise increase wasn't about added expenses but about social justice and economic empowerment.

Henry Ford Health was also the first major system in the state to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all 33,000 of its employees and contractors. The mandate was immediately met with pushback, including a brief lawsuit from about 50 employees that was later withdrawn.

Lassiter was also largely responsible for the September 2021 return of the Mackinac Policy Conference during the pandemic. The Detroit Regional Chamber's annual conference went on hiatus in 2020 due to COVID-19 and its occurrence in 2021 was unsure. But with Lassiter as its chair last year, the conference was able to institute a vaccine mandate for attendees. Coupled with the presence of Lassiter and his management team, the event would go on in the middle of a pandemic with reassurance that no major breakout would occur.

Henry Ford also opened a medical facility in partnership with Aldara Hospital and Medical Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last year. Months later, it opened a specialty hospital in Vellore, India, with Pearl Human Care Pvt. Ltd.

But it is the signing and extending of a partnership with Michigan State University that will seal Lassiter's legacy at Henry Ford.

In January 2021, the organizations finalized a 30-year partnership agreement that will create an MSU medical school and innovation campus near Henry Ford's Detroit hospital. Earlier this year, MSU approved faculty appointments for 115 researchers at Henry Ford. But it's the groundbreaking of a $150 million joint research institute in the next 15 months and the simultaneous creation of a four-year medical school in the city that is the linchpin to the partnership. The research center will house researchers and physicians on translational research — specifically looking at cancer, neuroscience, women's health, imaging and public health.

Henry Ford physicians and nurses will act as faculty in the program that will house upward of 25 students in human medicine and another 50 in osteopathic medicine and represent the first major medical school expansion in Detroit in more than 100 years.

Lassiter will miss the groundbreaking and completion of the new school; it will be the next CEO's shining moment. For that, Lassiter laments.

"I'm not a facade or facility guy. I don't get wildly excited about how many buildings I built," Lassiter said. "But I will be disappointed to not actually be sitting in the chair the day that the actual branch campus of Michigan State opens here in Detroit. And I will be saddened to not be part of the ribbon cutting of the new Henry Ford Hospital campus. Those are two things that are really important to the organization that I won't get to see, at least not up close."

But for Lassiter, that's leadership. Having the hard conversations, putting in the work, imbuing better ways to offer healthcare and putting those changes into action — transformation, Lassiter calls it — are the responsibilities of a leader. Photo ops and awards are the less important spoils.

"Being CEO of an organization like this, your impact is about movement more than just moments," Lassiter said. "I would say unequivocally the 'thing' I am most proud of is positioning the organization to be a lot closer to its potential than it was the day I walked in the door. My job was to reduce the gap between today and what's possible. I think I did that."

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Now Lassiter's appetite for "transformation" is larger and more complicated — and political.

"I think we have more than sufficient wherewithal, if we were focused on it, to create the right kind of healthcare climate across the United States that would empower people to be able to live their best selves and pursue health as best they can," Lassiter said. "The fact that we don't, in my mind, is one of our greatest flaws as a country. I look forward to speaking as the CEO of the largest healthcare system in the country to talk about how we get over our excuses."

And he plans to drag legislators, administrators and taxpayers over the finish line kicking and screaming if he must.

"Getting to a better place is the goal," Lassiter said. "I plan to, for however many years I have left in healthcare, to push and pull from a national perspective the debates around a better healthcare ecosystem for our country. And if I can contribute to that in a significant way, along with leading my new organization successfully, then you know, it's a life well lived."

This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain's Detroit Business.