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36 2015 Economic Forecast www.wbjournal.com Worcester Business Journal Top 5 stories of 2014 Charting new courses and moving ahead 2015 WORCESTER • WEST YARMOUTH • FRAMINGHAM • MILFORD Accounting and Tax Services | Business Consulting Services | Business Transition / Exit Planning Financial Services and Retirement Planning It's Tough to See ings Clearly ese Days Knowledge, experience, and expertise to help you see more clearly. S&G's best practice business solutions provide greater profitability today and greater business value tomorrow. Call Ronald Masiello at 508-757-3311 to set up a no obligation meeting. Services Delivered with Fanatical Customer Focus... Guaranteed! (508) 757-3311 • www.sgllp.com C hange can be painful, invigorating, or both. For UMass Memorial Health Care, change yielded a lot of pain as the largest health care system — and largest employer — in Central Massachusetts (5) Laurie Leshin takes the helm as the first female president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. T here aren't too many college presidents who have an asteroid that bears their name. But the asteroid — 4922 Leshin — is in no danger of strik- ing the planet, Laurie Leshin playfully told a gathering of about 700 business leaders earlier this month. WPI's hiring of Leshin represented a bigger impact this year. She's a suc- cessful woman in a male-dominated field, a geochemist and space scientist who spent six years as a senior leader at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and worked on the Mars Curiosity rover mission. At a time of increased emphasis on the STEM disciplines — science, technol- ogy, engineering and mathematics — in education, her expertise in both educa- tion and the sciences, coupled with her engaging manner (follow @LaurieofMars on Twitter and you'll find out) sends a message that a "nerdy" field need not be exclusive to people who see themselves as nerds. More women have been getting that message. e hiring of Leshin, who took office in June, came at a time when the proportion of full-time female under- graduates at WPI had grown steadily from 28.3 percent in the fall of 2009 to nearly 33 percent in 2013. n (4) UMass Memorial Health Care's tenuous finances take a turn for the better late in the year as the largest health care system in the region deals with the effects of health care reform. turned in a $55 million operating loss in its 2013 fiscal year. It also took a hit in the credit markets in June when Standard & Poor's lowered the system's credit rating from stable to negative. But after fiscal year 2014 closed in September, following job cuts and bat- tles with nurses' unions, the system was on its way toward ending the cycle with close to a $30 million operational sur- plus. It also shrunk its asset portfolio by selling Wing Memorial Hospital in Palmer and cutting its ownership stake in Worcester's Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital from 50 percent to 20 percent. "What we saw happen to us is about the future of health care," CEO Eric Dickson told us, citing the shift of patient care away from hospitals and into homes, more minimally invasive surgeries, and a shift toward technolo- gy-enabled "remote consultations" between doctors and patients. n >> Continued from Page 11