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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Baystate CEO Peter Banko faces plagiarism accusations over company blog posts
SPRINGFIELD — Peter Banko, Baystate Health's president and CEO, has been accused of plagiarizing other writers in a number of internal blog posts. 'We are aware of a complaint to our compliance hotline in January and May and it is being managed as an internal compliance matter,' said Heather Duggan, a spokesperson for the hospital. 'The Baystate Health Board of Trustees has discussed and addressed it with our President & CEO.' When asked Thursday how the board addressed it, and if Banko was available to speak about it, Duggan declined to comment. A review of internal blog posts obtained by The Republican shows that items appearing under Banko's name contain sections that are identical or very similar to other previously published materials, from sources including Wikipedia, NPR and Harvard Business School's blog. The original authors are not credited. The allegations were first reported Thursday morning by The Boston Globe. 'This is not a one-off mistake, this is a pattern of behavior,' said a Baystate Health employee who submitted a complaint to the hospital system. The person did not want to be named for fear it would impact their employment. Banko writes in a January 2025 post about five Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speeches one should know — the same topic of an NPR article published almost a year earlier. Not only is Banko's list of speeches the same as the NPR story, but multiple paragraphs in his post are nearly identical to sections of the NPR article. Jonathan Eig, author of a biography on King, is quoted in the NPR story commenting on King's 'I've Been to the Mountaintop!' speech that he delivered in 1968. 'The speech really does feel a bit like his own eulogy,' Eig told NPR. 'He's talking about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn't live to see the Promised Land.' Banko's post includes nearly the same quote, but he writes it as his own words. 'The speech does feel a bit like his own eulogy. He talks about earthly salvation and heavenly salvation. And, in the end, boldly equating himself with Moses, who doesn't live to see the Promised Land.' The same post by Banko contains several other sentences and phrases that are nearly the same as those from another expert source NPR interviewed about an MLK speech. The blog posts by Banko are for employees and meant to be 'digestible, informative, and inspirational,' Duggan said. 'Metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced to make the content relatable and tangible to the work we are doing right here in Western Massachusetts,' she said of the posts. Banko has been president and CEO of Baystate since June 2024. He was previously CEO of Centura Health, in Centennial, Colorado, and took the job at Baystate replacing now-retired Dr. Mark Keroack. In another post, 'Over a Bowl of Gumbo,' Banko writes about Leah Chase, known as the 'Queen of Creole Cuisine.' One paragraph in his post is, aside from the omission of a phrase, just a few words different from a passage in a Wikipedia article about Chase. In a post entitled 'I want the Truth!' Banko writes about lying. 'When I was growing up, one of the principles in my parent's house was that 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.' He later wrote: 'However as we get older, the truth becomes more nuanced — and there are times when a little white lie or the absence of some key facts might be appropriate. The problem is that all of us have different standards for when, why, and how we shade the truth." Those paragraphs are nearly identical to a 2013 blog post from entitled 'Why Organizational Truth Has Many Shades of Gray.' To the employee who reported the suspected plagiarism to the hospital, it wasn't a gray area. 'It violates the legal, ethical, and professional standards that he himself laid out in our code of conduct,' they wrote in the complaint, which they shared with The Republican. 'Simply put, it is terrible leadership. Baystate employees and our patients deserve so much better than this.' The employee said they were reading a post from late April called 'All apologies,' in which Banko talks about a letter an Apple CEO wrote in 2007. Banko's post reads: 'On September 6, 2007, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to 'all iPhone customers' that was published on Apple's website. It's no longer available there, but I am sure you can find it through a Google search.' The employee did their own Google search and found a 2022 opinion article on It reads: " ... on September 6, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to 'all iPhone customers,' that was published on Apple's website. (It's no longer available there, but you can read the entire thing via a copy on the internet archive.)" The story says of the letter: 'the entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you're wrong.' Banko writes that: 'The entire thing is a masterclass in admitting when you are wrong.' Read the original article on MassLive.
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Baystate Health CEO accused of plagiarism amid company's financial struggles
The company posts in question appeared from July 1 of last year through as recently as May 12. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement '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.' Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Baystate Health CEO Peter Banko elected to MHA Board of Trustees
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) – Baystate Health President and CEO Peter D. Banko has been elected to the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association (MHA) Board of Trustees, the organization announced on January 30. MHA represents hospitals, health systems, and healthcare providers across the state, advocating for policy initiatives and improvements in patient care. Banko's appointment comes at a crucial time for Massachusetts' healthcare sector as it continues to recover from the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. 'It is our honor to welcome Peter to the MHA Board at a critical time for the commonwealth's healthcare system,' said MHA President and CEO Steve Walsh. 'He brings a highly valuable national healthcare perspective to our mission, as well as a strong vision for the future of care delivery and patient access.' As a board member, Banko will help address key challenges facing hospitals, including capacity constraints, workforce shortages, and financial sustainability. MHA aims to strengthen the state's reputation for healthcare innovation by advancing new models of care, addressing patient care disparities, and reimagining the healthcare workforce. 'We are blessed to have a health association that creates a bridge for collaboration and partnership amongst hospitals and health system leaders across Massachusetts,' said Banko. 'I look forward to working together to advocate for healthcare in New England and to find opportunities to advance care for our neighbors and caregivers in Western Massachusetts.' Since joining Baystate Health in June 2024, Banko has led the organization's efforts to enhance patient care, improve financial stability, and expand healthcare access in the region. Under his leadership, Baystate Health is implementing a six-year, $1.2 billion investment strategy to strengthen its operations and maintain independence as a leading healthcare provider in New England. Banko previously served as President and CEO of Centura Health, overseeing hospitals across Colorado, Kansas, and Utah. His career also includes leadership roles at Catholic Health Initiatives, CHRISTUS Spohn Health System, and St. Vincent in Little Rock, Arkansas. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
