Vince Jensen, Chief Operating Officer for Sansum Clinic for the past three years, is stepping down to return to his former job with the City of Hope as merger negotiations between Sansum and Cottage Hospital continue. Jensen was commuting three to five hours a day and the grind, said clinic administrators, got to be too much. They stressed Jensen was in no way being forced out. Jensen oversaw the construction of Sansum’s new outpatient surgery center, its new call center, and its merger with the Santa Barbara Cancer Center during his three-year tenure.
Ironically, it would be the creation of the new outpatient surgery center — designed to bolster Sansum’s then sagging bottom line — that gave federal regulators most immediate pause when contemplating the proposed merger between the two health care behemoths. They worried that a single entity would no longer have incentive to operate what had been two competing clinics. As a consequence, they ordered Cottage to sell its outpatient surgery facility, in existence far longer than the Sansum facility, which opened just two years ago.
Jensen will be replaced by Sansum’s Chief Financial Officer Chad Hine.