Most notably, Bell in May promoted BMC’s physician-in-chief Tony Hollenberg to the newly created position of hospital president. Until that appointment, the chief executive ran both the hospital and the broader parent organization. Shifting hospital management responsibilities to Hollenberg will allow Bell to focus more on strategic planning and integrating the various arms of BMC’s system — including its WellSense health plan, which provides Medicaid coverage throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Other new positions in the parent organization were announced in February: chief strategy officer Cindy Bo, who joined from Nemours Children’s Health, and chief transformation officer Jesse Souweine, who came to BMC from the Broad Institute. Also that month, Joy Brown joined in a newly expanded role of chief digital information officer.
Bell’s path to BMC was a bit circuitous. A physician by training, he originally planned to move back to his native Scotland after getting a master’s degree at Harvard Business School in 2006. Instead, he stayed in Boston, working as a health care consultant at McKinsey & Co. More than 12 years ago, then-BMC chief executive Kate Walsh recruited him to be vice president for strategy implementation. Bell eventually rose through the management ranks to become Walsh’s number two, and was the obvious choice for the chief executive job when Walsh left to join Governor Maura Healey’s administration last year.
Through much of that time, the South End hospital and the health plan were largely run as separate organizations, both focused on serving lower-income populations, Bell said. But in recent years, WellSense membership boomed, and many BMC patients now belong to the health plan. It made sense to better coordinate the two operations. The group also operates pharmacy services consultant Clearway Health, and an 82-bed mental health center that opened in Brockton two years ago. And on Tuesday, as an example of the expansion opportunities Bell is considering, BMC Health System is launching a consulting partnership called Oakwell with Pittsburgh investment firm Omicelo that will offer advice to health care providers on energy efficiency renovations and other climate-friendly measures.
Today, Bell leads an organization with around 10,000 employees, and one that reported $6 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year.
“We’ve got a system of [many more] interconnections than what we had 10 years ago,” Bell said. “We hadn’t really evolved our management structure.”
The challenges facing the industry are already well known. Hospitals are struggling to keep up with staffing and recruitment in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in Massachusetts, the Steward Health Care bankruptcy presents another challenge, with rival operators preparing bids for individual Steward hospitals — BMC has been encouraged to pursue one or both of the Steward hospitals in Boston, St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton and Carney Hospital in Dorchester. (Bell declined to say whether he’ll submit any bids.)
“We’re very interested in doing anything we can to support a constructive resolution of the situation,” Bell said.
Bell will also continue to burnish BMC’s reputation as an academic leader in public health. Given Boston’s prominent academic medical centers — BMC, home to Boston University’s medical school, among them — this city plays an outsized role in the field of medical research.
“I think BMC stands shoulder to shoulder with those organizations,” Bell said. “We perform an essential role locally in practical ways and from a leadership standpoint have an essential role in how we think about the care and payment of health care for lower-income communities.”
Fanning goes from MassMutual to one of its software providers
Mike Fanning’s retirement didn’t last for long.
One year after retiring from a top executive position at MassMutual in May 2023, Fanning is back in business. Except this time, the business is software, not insurance.
Fanning has taken over as chief executive at Advisor360, a Weston provider of software solutions for wealth managers and similar firms, replacing Richard Napolitano, who is retiring but staying on for an unspecified time as a special adviser.
Even though Fanning is switching industries — he rose to be US president during his 17 years at MassMutual — the technology provided by Advisor360 is already quite familiar to him. That’s because MassMutual was Advisor360′s first large enterprise client after the software firm spun off from Commonwealth Financial Network in 2019, and the Springfield insurer remains its largest customer.
Fanning spent most of the past year as chairman of Advisor360′s board, before becoming its chief executive. He oversees a staff of roughly 700 people, including nearly 600 who work at the headquarters on Route 20 in Weston.
“I’m just passionate for the project,” Fanning said. “I was [also] reenergized. . . . Having a few months off put a spring back into my step.”
New leaders to push forward on fintech
When the leaders of the Mass Fintech Hub reconvene later this month, there will be two new cochairs at the helm: Reading Cooperative Bank chief executive Julie Thurlow and Sears Merritt, head of enterprise technology and experience at MassMutual.
The public-private partnership acts as a networker and convener to bring together legacy financial institutions with fintech startups, investors, and academic experts, with financial backing from the quasi-public Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. In their new roles, Merritt and Thurlow will lead the next quarterly meeting of the hub’s Fintech Working Group on July 16 at Boston University. Their next big event will take place on Oct. 2, when the fintech hub hosts a large-scale career fair at UMass Boston.
Thurlow takes over for former state housing and economic development secretary Mike Kennealy, now with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, while Merritt takes the cochair position that his former MassMutual colleague Mike Fanning once held.
“I’m . . . really happy to be able to carry on his footsteps,” Merritt said. “The goal is to follow what Massachusetts has done in the life sciences sector and really make fintech a core part of the Massachusetts economy.”
Tanglewood gets a new look; thank Colossus
Now that the concert season is in full swing at Tanglewood in Lenox, the regulars might notice something different about the venerated venue this season. The brand identity, banners and signs have been swapped out with a newer, more modern look. Perhaps more importantly, these images represent a consistent design scheme that unifies Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Hall, and the Boston Pops.
It’s all part of a new marketing effort being rolled out by Boston agency Colossus to refresh the branding elements and also better tie them together with their parent organization, the BSO. The new graphic language uses shapes inspired by the curved structures at Symphony Hall, the semicircle of the Esplanade’s Hatch Shell, and the triangle of Tanglewood’s music shed.
Colossus won the job with the BSO more than two years ago. But you don’t make snap decisions when tinkering with nearly 150 years of history.
Travis Robertson, executive creative director at Colossus, said his team worked closely with the BSO to exhaustively research that history before brainstorming designs. Robertson said the BSO hasn’t yet launched an extensive media campaign to play up its new look, but he hopes the nonprofit will do so in the near future.
“You can design salad dressing bottles and sneakers and corporate logos all day long,” Robertson said. “But there’s a real cultural weight to this, which I think is really cool.”
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.
