Bob Carter, MD, PhD, took the helm as CEO of Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Health in February. Also serving as the university’s senior vice president for health sciences, he now oversees the $6.3 billion academic health system, which includes research enterprises across five schools and colleges.
Dr. Carter is focused on expanding the system’s presence throughout Utah and the Intermountain West, particularly by broadening the reach of its clinical programs, he told Becker’s.
One of the health system’s key initiatives in 2025 is the development of its first community hospital build: West Valley City Hospital and Health Center, breaking ground in mid-2025. The roughly $1 billion project will serve the growing, diverse and medically underserved West Valley City community with an inpatient facility and multispecialty health center.
“This project is coupling healthcare delivery with economic opportunity and healthcare education,” he said. “Some of the focus will include development of opportunities in the health system for local members of the community, and we’re looking forward to providing services that are currently unavailable there.”
In March, Dr. Carter oversaw the opening of the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, an 85,000-square-foot facility designed to manage mental health crises.
“It’s a 24/7 facility where patients can walk in and get acute mental healthcare and access services,” he said. “More broadly, this was a partnership between government, community leaders and our hospital system, and we’re excited to see this as a potential model for healthcare delivery and mental health around the country in the future.”
U of U Health is expanding its cancer care services through a new Huntsman Cancer Institute in Vineyard, Utah, improving access for patients who currently travel over an hour to reach the Salt Lake City campus, Dr. Carter said.
As the system grows to meet the needs of a rising population, it is also prioritizing improvements to the care continuum. The long-term vision includes delivery care that spans from the first symptom or diagnosis through to quaternary care, while incorporating both population health and acute care management.
“We have a plan that’s developing for this, and my goal for us as a healthcare system is to bring the same quality that we’ve been known for on our inpatient services across our entire system,” he said. “We want to ensure that culture of quality thrives as we become a larger organization and deliver care more broadly across the state.”
Leadership development is another priority for 2025.
“We’re looking more and more at how we will align our system leadership together,” he said. “We are expanding the number of our facilities, so we need structures that will allow us to have a broader overview to ensure that our quality and outcome objectives are achieved across a variety of physical locations and different structure types.”
Building strong teams
Before joining U of U Health, Dr. Carter served as neurosurgeon-in-chief at Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham and held the William and Elizabeth Sweet Endowed Professor in Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“As a neurosurgeon often involved in delivering high-complexity care in the operating room environment, it was always very apparent to me that the care we deliver is only as good as the strong teams we build up,” he said. “It’s not just the surgeon — it’s the entire team that provides those best outcomes, including the preoperative, intraoperative and postoperative management.”
Building strong, highly-communicative teams remains a cornerstone of his leadership approach.
“I like to enhance and push out the notion that we can communicate honestly and openly with each other to get the best patient outcomes,” he said. “We have a terrific team culture at the University of Utah, so I felt like my style has meshed nicely with the strong foundation that’s already here.”
Optimism in the industry
While it is natural to focus on the latest “super trends” in medicine such as artificial intelligence and personalized gene and cell therapies, Dr. Carter emphasized the importance of preserving the human element, even as we deploy ever more advanced technology in healthcare.
“Creating workplaces and environments where both patients and providers can thrive together is so critical,” he said. “I’d like to see us all pay more attention to being proactive in the way we foster relationships and the kinds of structures and support programs that we have for our provider communities to deliver healthcare and serve the broader population in the best way possible.”
Dr. Carter said he remains optimistic about the future of healthcare — particularly academic healthcare.
“We certainly have challenges, but one of the things that I think our academic health systems have shown is a resilience and an ability to be creative and tackle those challenges,” Dr. Carter said. “That is something we are very attuned to, trying to always create the systems and structures to allow innovation to thrive, and that’s the special place where our academic health systems contribute to the broader healthcare initiatives across our country and the world.”
