Detroit Medical Center CEO Audrey Gregory is leaving the organization after two years at the helm of the investor-owned hospital on Oct. 22.
DMC said Thursday afternoon that Gregory will become president and CEO of a health system in central Florida. She will be replaced on an interim basis by Brittany Lavis, the organization’s CFO.
Gregory joined DMC in October 2019 as president, and CEO of DMC Detroit Receiving Hospital, DMC Harper University Hospital, DMC Heart Hospital and DMC Hutzel Women’s Hospital. Prior to that, she was market CEO of DMC parent company Tenet Healthcare’s Saint Francis Healthcare System in Memphis, Tenn. and CEO of St. Francis Hospital – Memphis.
Gregory was the latest in a line of CEOs with relatively brief stints at the hospital system. She succeeded Tony Tedeschi, who had worked for Tenet nearly a decade and led DMC since 2017. Tedeschi’s tenure was marked by challenges including financial concerns and accreditation problems with cardiology and neurosurgery residency programs as well as quality citations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Crain’s previously reported.
Tedeschi had inherited many of those challenges when he took over for Joe Mullany, who had helmed the health care company for four years. Mullany was replaced amid a push by Tenet to cut costs and an investigation into flaws with DMC’s sterile surgical processing.
More recently, DMC has navigated challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to financial strains and labor shortages for many hospitals in the region. Henry Ford Health System, Michigan Medicine and Beaumont Hospital said they were forced to close beds recently due to the labor shortage, Crain’s reported.
Lavis has served as CFO at the hospital system for three years. Before coming to DMC, she was the Placentia-Linda Hospital CFO for Tenet in Southern California, as well as group CFO for the seven hospitals in Tenet’s Southern California Group with annual revenues of $1.7 billion.