Cambia Health Solutions CEO Mark Ganz is retiring at the end of the year, the company announced Tuesday. He's been CEO since 2003. Jared Short, who currently serves as Cambia's president and chief operating officer, will move into the CEO roll effective Jan. 1, 2021.
During his time at the head of the Portland, Ore.-based company, Ganz worked to push Cambia into multiple markets across the healthcare sector, moving beyond insurance to building a technology portfolio and a venture capital arm.
"The best way for disruption to occur in healthcare would be if more companies like us disrupt themselves; we understand the space," Ganz told Modern Healthcare in a 2017 interview. "If we're willing to innovate past our time-honored business models, then no one should be able to stop us. But if we don't, then someone else is going to come along."
Ganz was named No. 65 on Modern Healthcare's 2019 list of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare.
Earlier this year, Cambia launched Journi, an app that aims to use artificial intelligence to offer users a broad array of services across the delivery system, including locating in-network providers, conducting real-time chats with a nurse, tracking deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, and accessing health coaching.
"As COVID-19 magnifies the gaps in our health care system, Journi is perfectly timed to bring together the fragmented experience," Ganz said last month in a press statement announcing Journi's launch. "Designed over several years by deeply listening to people and engineered to put the individual at the center, Journi offers support that revolves around the unique needs of each one of us in sickness and in health, when and how we need it most."
Not every move worked out though. Cambia and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina late last year called off a proposed affiliation days after the North Carolina insurer's former CEO was found guilty of charges connected to a June car accident.
The insurers had planned to share management, administrative, operational and other corporate services under a long-term services-management agreement under the Cambia name.
Short has more than 15 years of experience at Cambia. He also worked at BlueCross BlueShield of Montana. He was named COO in 2015 and added the president title in 2019.
"We will build on the values-centered foundation he created as we move forward as a company—imagining, innovating and focused on the needs of the people and families we serve, now and into the future," he said in a prepared statement.
