Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/469117
www.wbjournal.com • Worcester Business Journal 17 25 YEARS: IMPACTFUL COMPANIES The Hanover name is highly recognizable in Central Massachusetts, beginning with the sign outside Hanover Insurance Group's headquarters. The largest publicly traded company based in the city, Hanover serves 1.5 million policyholders worldwide. Above right, the distinctive Albert Sherman Center at the University of Massachusetts Medical School fosters research, education and collaboration. The school, acclaimed for its primary-care focus, is a clinical partner to UMass Memorial Health Care (opposite page: Memorial Campus in Worcester), the region's largest employer. N o other company has dominated Greater Worcester's business and community worlds over the last quarter century as has Hanover Insurance. Its name is attached to venues across the city, from the insurance giant's head- quarters on Lincoln Street to the down- town Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts, to Hanover Insurance Park at Fitton Field on the Holy Cross campus, which serves as the home of the Worcester Bravehearts of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. The 160-year-old Hanover has, over the decades, gone by three previous names: Hanover Fire Insurance (its orig- inal moniker), State Mutual Life Assurance and Allmerica Financial. The publicly traded firm's holdings include Citizens Insurance Co. of America, headquartered in Michigan, and Chaucer Holdings PLC, based in London, along with their various affili- ates. The $4.5-billion Hanover ranks among the top 25 property-and-casualty insurers in the U.S., maintaining high ratings from A.M. Best, Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service. The company's 5,000 employees serve more than 1.5 million individual and business policyholders worldwide. In 2007, The Wall Street Journal cited Hanover as the leader in the P&C indus- try for increasing shareholder value over a five-year period. Over the next several years, Hanover made several acquisi- tions so that, by 2012, it was proclaiming that it was "well positioned for success — with the most talented employees in the insurance industry." For 2013, the largest publicly traded company based in Worcester generated net profits of $251 million, or $5.06 per diluted share. U Mass Memorial Health Care was born in 1998 from the merger of the state-owned UMass Medical Center and the private, nonprofit Memorial Hospital. Sixteen years later, the private, nonprofit giant dominates the Central Massachusetts health-care landscape, although in ways that may not be healthy for its long-term survival. The U.S. health-care industry is engulfed in change that's being felt throughout the country, and that's quite acute here. UMass Memorial is both the largest health-care provider in the region and its largest employer. As such, it receives a lot of attention, notably with respect to a $55-million operating loss in its most recent fiscal year, which has been followed by a series of cost-cutting measures. This year alone, UMass Memorial announced plans to cut more than 100 positions at its Worcester hos- pitals, and a few more at HealthAlliance Hospital in Leominster. Meanwhile, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the system's credit rating, citing declin- ing admission volumes and "con- strained" revenue growth. Eric Dickson, who has been president and CEO for less than two years, is in an unenviable position. But he hasn't been reluctant to address the system's chal- lenges with UMass Memorial employ- ees. He has kept them informed of the many changes underway through his blog, not dodging the bad news, but put- ting the changes into context for the organization's 10,000-plus jobholders. In a post last spring, for instance, he out- lined his hopes to eliminate operating losses by 2015. Halfway through the most recently completed fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the system appeared to be headed in that direction, as losses were pared to $16.5 million. T he economic impact of UMass Medical School is huge. Founded in 1962 to provide affordable, high-quality medical education to state residents and to increase the number of primary-care physicians practicing in underserved areas of the state, it now generates more than $900 million in annual revenue. The school is consistently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the leading medical schools in the nation for primary-care education. UMass Medical consists of the follow- ing: the School of Medicine; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Graduate School of Nursing; more than 1,100 graduate-level students; a workforce of 6,800; several complex and diversified business units such as Commonwealth Medicine and MassBiologics of UMMS; and a thriv- ing, $250-million research portfolio. In fact, federal and private research grants and contracts rose from about $2 mil- lion in 1977, making the school one of the fastest-growing research institutions in the U.S. In 2006, UMass Medical achieved global recognition, and a significant first for itself, when Craig Mello, the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Fire of Stanford University, for their discoveries related to RNA interference. Three years later in 2009 — and as part of the since-stalled nationwide building boom in health care — UMass Medical School broke ground on the 500,000-square-foot Albert Sherman Center, a research and education facility that opened in 2013. Hanover Insurance Group UMass Memorial Health Care 2 University of Massachusetts Medical School 3 >> Continued on Page 18 1 2 3