Stallone departs from Centralus CEO position; Lawlis named successor

Martin Stallone will leave his position as chief executive officer of Centralus Health on Nov. 7 to step into the role of executive vice president and chief health services officer at Excellus Lifetime.

Robert Lawlis, who has been with Cayuga Health for 17 years and currently serves as the chief executive officer of Cayuga Health Partners and, concurrently, the CEO of Xtensys, was unanimously selected by the Centralus Health Board of Directors to succeed Stallone.

“I am confident in Mr. Lawlis’ ability to lead Centralus Health into its next chapter,” said Tom LiVigne, co-chairman of the Board of Directors of Centralus Health. “His deep knowledge of our health system, and dedication to improving operations through the lens of high-quality, equitable care makes him the right leader for this moment.”

Stallone said that he will remain a member of the medical staff.

“The board of directors expresses its genuine and heartfelt appreciation for Dr. Marty Stallone’s leadership of Cayuga Health and Centralus Health,” LiVigne said. “Marty’s tireless efforts and bold leadership created successful new relationships with key clinical and organizational partners, to improve the care available to everyone we serve. Marty has left an indelible mark on our community, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for his long service.”

“I’ll still be affiliated with the organization, but in a different capacity,” Stallone explained. “I’ll be an occasional practitioner of hospital medicine.”

Stallone said that the practitioner role is one he can fulfill while in his new position at The Lifetime Healthcare Companies, which he will begin in December.

“Those can overlap. … And so, in this way, I can continue to be active in the community,” Stallone explained. “I can contribute to patient care, utilize the clinical skills that I spent many years developing, but still do a different administrative role.”

Stallone said that he is well positioned to provide leadership at Lifetime, the parent company of three health plans: Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield, Univera Healthcare in the Western New York region and Capital District Physician Health Plan in the Albany area.

“I would say Lifetime, as a nonprofit payer … they realize that deeper relationships with health systems and providers [are] necessary for the success of providers, health systems and health plans,” Stallone said. “They have admired what we stand for at Centralus and what we’ve accomplished, the direction that we’re going in … and they felt it was important on the health plan side to have clinical leadership to realize the value of a vertically integrated payer provider organization.”

“It’s all about taking waste out of the system and ensuring care along the continuum in a way that patients and residents of communities need,” he added.

Excellus and Centralus are related organizations in that the payers and the insurance companies collaborate and fund the health care operations that organizations like Centralus perform, Stallone said, adding that Lifetime presented him with an opportunity to play a role that utilizes his specific skill sets.

“I believe that I’ve demonstrated abilities to envision and then realize the building of systems that are needed to better serve populations, the relationships between organizations for a unified clinical purpose, and how to enact that,” Stallone said. “At the same time, having done everything we’ve done at Centralus, I recognized that the next skill set that’s really needed is more of an operational excellence skill set, where we would figure out how to optimize the organizations and the teams that have been brought under one organization: Centralus.”

Practically speaking, Stallone said, the timing of the transition makes sense because his term on the Cayuga Health Board of Directors ends just after the new year.

Lawlis thanked Stallone for his guidance and the opportunity to collaborate over the past 15 years, saying, “I’m eager to carry on our important work in service of the communities we serve.”

“I’ve been in the organization for a long, long time and have had the privilege of being on the leadership team for a while now, and so I’ve been close to the organization’s changes, developments and strategies,” he said. “I’m really most closely tied to operations and how things work and how to make them work smoothly, and I think we’ve got a fantastic strategy and position, which I intend to carry forward.”

It is a timely period for the transition to occur, he added.

“We have a lot of tightening and smoothing and focusing on patient experience to do … which is really what’s right up my alley,” Lawlis said. 

In January it was announced that Arnot Health and Cayuga Health will now operate as members of Centralus Health, as one entity serving the area. 

“Just because we’ve now come together — we’re now under one umbrella — doesn’t mean that we’re integrated. We still have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of things to do to make the patient experience what we really want it to be,” Lawlis said. 

“The real motivator in bringing the systems together is that Cayuga and Arnot both are, on their own, an awkward size to be able to maintain certain types of services in the community,” he explained. “So, when you get to specialties and subspecialties that help a health system care for its communities, there are a lot of things that we have one or two of.”

Affiliation has meant that providers for Arnot can step in when providers for Cayuga Health are unavailable, and vice versa, ensuring that the services they provide can continue, Lawlis explained.

“We have things where Arnot providers are allowing care to continue in Ithaca, and Ithaca providers are allowing care to continue in Elmira, so that was the vision and the strategy that we actually want to be able to do in order to do a better job of serving our communities,” he said. 

Appointment scheduling remains a challenge that Centralus is committed to streamlining for a better patient experience, he added. “When you’re a new person, a new patient coming into the community, and we have a bunch of different locations and also independent practices that we collaborate closely with, it can be hard to find your way to the provider that’s got capacity,” he said. 

He added that right now “health care is a challenged sector.”

“There are federal spending cuts, there’s work in the state to figure out what those [cuts] mean — it is not an easy time to be a nurse, a doctor, a provider of any type. It’s not an easy time to be a health system,” Lawlis said. “We’re really looking at what we can continue to do to provide the best services in our community and to take care of our patients, our community and all of those employees I just referenced.”