Atrium Health, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based health system, has appointed UPMC’s Rasu Shrestha as its executive vice president and chief strategy officer. He will start his new position in February 2019.
In his role at Atrium, which was formerly known as Carolinas HealthCare System, Shrestha will oversee planning and tactical direction. He’ll also lead Atrium’s renewed focus on innovation.
His new position was formerly held by Carol Lovin, who was promoted to Atrium’s executive vice president and system chief of staff.
Shrestha, a physician, comes to Atrium from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which he joined in 2007, according to his LinkedIn profile. Most recently, he served as UPMC’s chief innovation officer and executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, the system’s innovation and commercialization arm.
A UPMC spokeswoman emailed the following statement from UPMC Enterprises president Tal Heppenstall: “We wish Rasu well in his new role and hope to work with him in the future in driving healthcare innovation. His passion for solving healthcare problems remains central to what we do at UPMC.”
Shrestha did not immediately respond to an emailed request for further comment. But in a LinkedIn post, he wrote: “I have been immediately drawn to the remarkably human ambitions of Atrium Health to ‘improve health, elevate hope and advance healing – for all.’ What a remarkable place to start my next chapter forward.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Mykyta Dolmatov, Getty Images
