This story was originally published by The Lund Report, an independent nonprofit health news organization based in Oregon. It is republished with permission. You can reach Nick Budnick at nick@thelundreport.org.
Exterior of a PeaceHealth facility in Vancouver in an undated provided image.
Courtesy of PeaceHealth / The Lund Report
Leaked records indicating a top executive at PeaceHealth attempted to influence care involving hundreds of Oregon patients have led to Jim McGovern being placed on leave, as well as a raft of questions for local observers.
Now those questions will be raised in federal court as local doctors try to stop the hospital system’s controversial decision to contract out emergency room care to an Atlanta firm.
Among the questions that observers are raising: Did PeaceHealth’s plan to change emergency room providers amount to retaliation against local doctors who opposed meddling in patient care? Or did it reflect a decision to go with a more malleable group of doctors to better cut costs?
PeaceHealth representatives are largely declining to comment in the wake of the leak. They did not agree to an interview concerning the questions being raised or respond to questions about the implications about the leaked documents, instead issuing a general statement acknowledging a review of McGovern’s actions was underway.
Health lawyer and former Eugene lawmaker Marty Wilde, who used the leaked documents to break the news of the internal strife at PeaceHealth on Substack, told The Lund Report the Vancouver-based nonprofit system owes its community more information.
“I think the community needs more input to what’s going on at PeaceHealth, and they need more awareness of what’s going on at PeaceHealth,” he said.
An attorney, Wilde has a master’s in health care administration and a specialty in health law. He also worked as executive director of the Lane County Medical Society.
He said the records show the complexities behind PeaceHealth’s decision making, and also that “PeaceHealth’s got egg on its face.”
Outsourcing plan leads to lawsuit
PeaceHealth has had years of financial troubles, leading to overall losses in 2025 of about 2% — well below the 3% profit margin that hospital consultants consider a marker of financial stability.
PeaceHealth’s plan to outsource its emergency room services to an Atlanta-based firm, ApolloMD, reportedly has been underway since late last year, but since February the controversy has grown. The agreement would replace the system’s contract with a firm owned by local doctors and would affect services at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center in RiverBend, PeaceHealth Cottage Grove Community Medical Center and PeaceHealth Peace Harbor Medical Center.
The new arrangement, relying on a brand-new company set up by ApolloMD, is exactly the sort of arrangement that the Oregon Legislature sought to block with a law passed last year. The law barred nonmedical entities or personnel from owning or controlling private medical practices, including through hiring, setting work hours or determining compensation.
But changes made to the law meant that no state agency had clear authority to enforce the law, and the local doctors filed a lawsuit to block the transaction.
In federal court, they’ve filed a motion asking the judge to block the move. The motion, to which ApolloMD and PeaceHealth have not yet replied, will be heard by a federal judge on April 27 and 28.
Among other things the judge wants to hear from McGovern, who headed PeaceHealth’s operations in Oregon until he was recently placed on leave. That’s where the records Wilde obtained come in.
Records indicate meddling in patient care
The documents appear to show McGovern attempting to influence how the local emergency room doctors were providing care, seemingly because their decisions were costing the hospital money — among other things by increasing the number of people “boarded” by PeaceHealth without generating revenue.
Hospital leaders have said Oregon’s inability to fund adequate behavioral health, nursing facilities and other step-down facilities have in effect forced them to “board” or house patients who don’t need hospital-level medical care. Federal law says that patients must be admitted for emergency care, but they can’t be discharged unless the hospitals can ensure an adequate care plan afterward.
“Being too nice and overutilizing the hospital services results in 18 boarders this morning,” Mcgovern allegedly wrote in one message to a doctor in November 2023.
The records include a timeline referring to what apparently were hundreds of pages of emails sent by McGovern regarding patient care, care that involved hundreds of patients. Oftentimes he was criticizing the physicians for deciding the patients needed to be admitted, which could cost the hospital money.
The problem? First, that McGovern appeared to be pushing for his own judgment to override that of the doctors tasked with providing the care — who unlike him had a doctor-patient relationship and were subject to an ethical obligation to provide appropriate care based on accepted medical standards.
Sometimes he offered that input without apparently bothering to learn about the details of a patient’s situation. “I skimmed. Didn’t read in detail,” he wrote at one point after a PeaceHealth neurologist noted that McGovern’s criticism of one patient’s admission contradicted what medical records indicated was appropriate.
Not only that, but one doctor’s notes of conversations indicate that McGovern was pushing the emergency room doctors to not admit patients to the hospital— which if true could be at odds with a federal law requiring care be provided by hospital emergency rooms.
“I pushed back about ‘not admitting patients’ because we were already decreasing as many admissions as we could, just due to the boarding and space issues, but we were still being harassed about it,” wrote the doctor, Marget “Meg” Pattison, PeaceHealth’s Emergency Medicine Department chair.
Pattison reportedly contacted the Oregon Medical Board about the situation and was told that while McGovern, formerly a practicing doctor, had maintained an administrative license, it did not permit him to participate in patient care.
The records also show medical staff across PeaceHealth have united in the wake of the system’s move to further privatize its operations, urging McGovern be removed and that the decision to change emergency room providers be revisited.
PeaceHealth rejects medical staff requests
PeaceHealth leadership has, in effect, told the medical staff that won’t happen.
“We are proceeding with our plans for the transition to Lane Emergency Physicians this summer to ensure we continue providing uninterrupted, high-quality care to the residents of Lane County. PeaceHealth’s request for proposal committee was a multi-disciplinary team of leaders and collectively made the decision to change emergency department physician management partners in Lane County. It was never a decision made by one individual.”
Wilde, for his part, told The Lund Report that even if the PeaceHealth board approved of the ApolloMD decision, board members likely were not aware of what led up to the decision, and the ethical concerns the documents raise.
Now the leak of the documents means not only a judge will be scrutinizing how PeaceHealth has been operating its emergency rooms, but lawmakers will, too.
“This situation highlights a pattern of instability and lack of communication that has worried both providers and patients in our community, and is exactly why we are trying to separate accountants and attorneys and administrators from the responsibility for patient care,” Rep. Nancy Nathanson (D-North Eugene) said in a statement. “We need clear answers about what happened, how many patients may have been affected, and what safeguards will be put in place moving forward.”
Rep. Lisa Fragala (D-Eugene) echoed Nathanson, saying “These allegations are deeply concerning, and they reinforce why we’ve been pushing for greater transparency and adherence to Oregon’s patient-protection laws.”
As for Wilde, he calls the timing of the ApolloMD move suspicious, coming as it did shortly after McGovern learned that staff had submitted a complaint about his actions. He said that if PeaceHealth wanted more control over the physicians, it could simply hire them as employees.
“There’s other ways to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish that don’t add another layer of profit taking and bureaucracy in the system,” he said, adding that the emergency room doctors were not the ones causing the boarding problem.
“That’s the part that kind of makes me scratch my head and makes it look a lot more personal,” he said.
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