Baystate Health CEO accused of plagiarism amid company's financial struggles

Boston Globe

15-05-2025

The company posts in question appeared from July 1 of last year through as recently as May 12.
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One post described growing up in a home where lying was unacceptable, and featured sentences almost identical to those in a 2013 article in Forbes. Another recounted seeing the movie 'Conclave' to escape the toxic politics around the US election. It repeated phrases verbatim from a November article in a Pennsylvania newspaper.
The pattern was the subject of an anonymous complaint filed on May 4 with Baystate's compliance department by an employee who accused Banko of plagiarism.
Banko declined to be interviewed by the Globe about his blog. 'He's pretty much flat out until the end of time,' Baystate spokesperson Heather Duggan said.
In response to the Globe's queries, the company issued a statement that didn't mention plagiarism but said 'metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced [in Banko's blog] to make the content relatable and tangible.'
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'We are aware of the complaint to our compliance hotline, and the Baystate Health Board of Trustees has discussed and addressed the matter with our President & CEO,' the statement said, without elaborating.
An internal memo sent to Baystate executives on Wednesday and obtained by the Globe said, 'We understand that the compliance concern is specifically in reference to the lack of citing, attributing and sourcing information on numerous internal blog posts.'
Phone messages left with at least 10 members of the board of trustees went unreturned.
Baystate, a not-for-profit system with an annual budget of about $3 billion, has struggled financially in recent years, a topic Banko discussed with the
The complaint by the anonymous employee said Banko had violated the code of conduct adopted by Baystate in July 2024 after Banko became head of the system. The code, which is available on the internal network and displays Banko's signature, says employees must maintain 'the highest ethical standards' and can be disciplined if they fail to report misconduct.
The employee shared his complaint with the Globe, which is not identifying him to protect his anonymity. Banko's actions, he wrote in the complaint, violate 'the legal, ethical, and professional standards that he himself laid out in our code of conduct. Simply put, it is terrible leadership.'
The employee told the Globe he grew suspicious that Banko might be copying other writers, so he Googled distinctive language in the blog and found the original sources. He said he was outraged by the 'hypocrisy of [Banko] preaching to us in the blogs about truth.'
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Banko is not the first high-ranking hospital executive in New England to be accused of plagiarism. In 2019, Seleem Choudhury, the president and chief operating officer of Porter Medical Center in Middlebury, Vt., resigned soon after he was found to have plagiarized passages in weekly emails to staff,
Plagiarism is widely agreed to be unethical, but it also signals
'terrible' judgment when it can be detected so easily, said Alan Sager, a professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health.
'And if a person makes terrible judgments about matters separate from the core of their work, how can they be trusted to make good judgments and behave ethically in matters at the core of their work?' Sager said.
In a post called 'I Want the Truth!' in October, Banko wrote that he grew up in a house where one of the guiding principles was 'we had to tell the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Lying wasn't something you could get away with (although my sister and I tried). Like Pinocchio's nose, it would be apparent to others.'
In 2013, a
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In another post called 'Happy New Year,' Banko wrote that he and his wife had gone to a theater to see 'Conclave,' the movie about Vatican politics, shortly before Election Day. He had hoped, he wrote, 'to break away from the horse race politics and the hyperpolarized rhetoric. ... Little did I know the movie would provide me with valuable insight into the very thing I was trying to escape.'
A few weeks earlier, the
published an article by a guest columnist who wrote this about the same film: 'Just days before Election Day, I chose to go see a movie in a theater as a way to break away from the horse race politics and hyperpolarized rhetoric. Little did I know the movie would provide me with valuable insight into the very thing I was trying to escape.'
Paul Levy, chief executive of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2002 to 2011, wrote a daily public blog about health care during his last five years at the medical center and for more than four years after he left.
As Levy heard a description of Banko's blog passages during a telephone interview, he groaned loudly.
'No, no, no,' said Levy, who wrote more than 4,000 blog posts and now works as a business consultant. 'It's just fundamentally so unnecessary to do that, because it's quite easy to put something on your blog and attribute it to somebody else, and in so doing, you're lessening none of the impact.'
Banko was appointed Baystate's
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Banko had most recently served as president and chief executive of Centura Health, in Centennial, Colo., which was part of the national system CommonSpirit Health. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master's degree in health administration from Cornell University.
The controversy arises as Baystate grapples with upheaval and financial problems.
The health system, whose largest hospital, Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, has 716 beds and is a teaching site of the UMass Chan Medical School, lost $61 million in 2024, $63 million in 2023, and $177 million in 2022.
Baystate has made three rounds of job cuts since November, most recently
Baystate serves more than 800,000 people throughout western New England and has roots dating to the founding of Springfield Hospital in 1883, according to the company's
website.
The health system has more than 1,000 beds across four hospitals in Springfield, Greenfield, Westfield, and Palmer. It handles 196,000 visits to its emergency rooms a year. The hospitals deliver more than 4,800 babies annually.
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at