GRAND RAPIDS — Mercy Health Saint Mary’s has named Dr. Matt Biersack as president after he served in the role on an interim basis for the past five months.
Biersack’s appointment as the president at Mercy Health Saint Mary’s is effective immediately after today’s announcement. Biersack, the chief medical officer at Saint Mary’s since August 2019, succeeds Dr. Hyung Kim, who departed in March after less than two years.
Dr. Matt Biersack
COURTESY PHOTO
Biersack has been with Saint Mary’s since 2010 as a hospitalist physician and has held a series of leadership positions. Prior to serving as chief medical officer, he was chief quality and patient safety officer from November 2014 to August 2019, and medical director of the hospitalist group from July 2012 to November 2014.
A Grand Rapids native who earned his medical degree from the Wayne State University School of Medicine in 2007, Biersack also served his medical residency in internal medicine at Saint Mary’s.
“Dr. Biersack is a trusted and collaborative leader, who has continuously risen to the occasion within the various leadership roles he has held,” Rob Casalou, president and CEO of Trinity Health Michigan, Mercy Health’s parent corporation, said in a statement. “Over the last five months in his blended post, Dr. Biersack successfully led the Mercy Health Saint Mary’s team through the spring surge of COVID-19 and remained a visible and accessible expert that our leaders, colleagues, providers and community members look to for guidance.”
Biersack’s permanent appointment comes as nearby Mercy Health forges three new partnerships through joint ventures, including with Auburn Hills-based Havenwyck Hospital Inc. for a 60-bed psychiatric hospital near the Saint Mary’s outpatient campus in Byron Township. Another partnership includes the Cardiovascular Network of West Michigan that includes Mercy Health Muskegon and was formed with Metro Health-University of Michigan Health, which secured state approval in the spring to perform open-heart surgery.
Mercy Health in West Michigan previously formed a similar network for cancer care with Metro Health-University of Michigan Health.
“I’m honored to serve in the role as president of Mercy Health Saint Mary’s,” Biersack said in a statement. “I have a deep appreciation of the faith-based mission and values of this organization and hope to continue to lead it in a way that pays tribute to the founding Sisters of Mercy who began this ministry now 128 years ago. Working together with other Trinity Health Michigan hospital systems and medical groups — as well as our affiliated physician practices — we will continue to deliver on the promise of listening, partnering and making it easy for our patients.”
In an interview today with MiBiz, Biersack said Saint Mary’s wants to pursue additional partnerships to address the market gaps in care and the disparities that exist in health care. Further partnerships in behavioral health are one possibility for Saint Mary’s in the future, he said.
“We’ll see added partnerships as we move forward. We’re talking with others in the space of behavioral health and as we look at the broader complement of our services where we’re certainly open to partnerships that help facilitate providing complementary services where it makes sense,” Biersack said. “We’re strategically positioning ourselves with the right partners to kind of go outside of our own walls and work with people who are experts on different areas and that will leverage their skills and complement their skills so that we can bring added value to the community.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Saint Mary’s partnered earlier this year with Spectrum Health and the Kent County Health Department on a mass vaccine clinic that administered more than 230,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses in nearly four months.
Owned by Livonia-based Trinity Health, Mercy Health Saint Mary’s consists of the main hospital in Grand Rapids, the adjacent Lacks Cancer Center, and Hauenstein Neuroscience Center. The broader Mercy Health system includes the Grand Rapids hospitals, Mercy Health Muskegon and Mercy Health Lakeshore in Shelby, with more than 8,000 employees.
Editor’s note: This story has been clarified to say that a 60-bed psychiatric hospital planned under a partnership with Havenwyck Hospital Inc. will be near Saint Mary’s outpatient campus in Byron Township.
