Dr Ryan Noach stepping down as Discovery Health CEO

The CEO of Discovery Health, Dr Ryan Noach, has resigned and will leave the medical aid administrator at the end of this year. The group says Noach is pursuing “an entrepreneurial opportunity outside of the healthcare and financial services sectors”.

His departure is something of a surprise, especially as the group enters a new period of uncertainty with government hellbent on implementing National Health Insurance (NHI), expected to be fully in place by January 2026.

Discovery Health remains the group’s largest business, and one of the top two contributors to profit (alongside Discovery Life).

Discovery Health boasts R3.8bn profit

In the year to 30 June, Discovery Health reported profit of R3.8 billion (up 7%), with new business up a remarkable 19% to R8.7 billion.

It has 3.8 million lives under administration, across the Discovery Health Medical Scheme (DHMS, with separate and independent governance), restricted schemes and non-scheme (insurance) products.

DHMS has 57.8% market share of the open scheme market.

Noach has been with Discovery for 15 years and was appointed CEO of Discovery Health in January 2020, just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Prior to this, he was deputy CEO of the business for five years, and COO from 2009.

ALSO READ: Discovery slashes medical savings on top plans – what you need to know

Discovery Health deputy steps up

He will be replaced by Dr Ronald Whelan, the current deputy CEO of Discovery Health, “following a three-month handover period”.

In its statement, the group is at pains to highlight that this is “in line with the established succession plan that has been in place for over a year”.

It says Whelan is a “medical doctor with an MBA and extensive clinical and commercial healthcare experience”.

He joined the business in 2019 and “led Discovery Health’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, working closely with B4SA and the National Department of Health (“NdoH”) in the national vaccination project”.

He has been a member of the Discovery South Africa exco since 2020 and “will be appointed to the Discovery Limited Executive Committee”.

“Together with a strong executive team, he is well positioned to take the business forward.”

Prior to Discovery, Whelan was a partner and head of healthcare investments at investment and advisory firm Spinnaker Growth Partners, and before that he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey.

While at Spinnaker, he founded Healthforce, a leading telemedicine player in South Africa.

His tenure at Discovery thus far – not even four years – makes him unique in terms of executive appointments across the group. These tend to be leaders who have been in the business for closer to a decade.

Recall that Noach had been at Discovery for close on 12 years when he took over as CEO of Discovery Health.

Noach’s time in charge, four years, is short when compared to his predecessor, Dr Jonathan Broomberg, who was CEO of the business for nine years. But, in many ways, Broomberg was the outlier who built the business into the formidable market leader it is today.

Prior to Broomberg, Neville Koopowitz was CEO for around five years. He took over from Discovery co-founder Barry Swartzberg in 2006.

NHI challenges looming

Whelan will have to navigate the actual implementation of NHI, or its inevitable delay as is government’s wont. The next few years are going to be critical in navigating a way for private healthcare and public healthcare to co-exist in a reimagined way, to the benefit of all South Africans.

The group’s stated position is that “NHI is not workable without private sector collaboration”.

This will require a change to Section 33 of the bill which, at this point, says “medical schemes may only offer complementary cover to services not reimbursable by the fund”.

ALSO READ: NHI: what about medical schemes and medical insurance?

He is going to need his experience from his work during the pandemic, and lean on involvement in “strategy, operations, scheme risk management and ancillary healthcare services”.

Interestingly, whatever entrepreneurial opportunity Noach has been seized by is surely potentially lucrative. He will be walking away from “decent” remuneration as well as a sizeable pile of share options. Neither of these are disclosed for prescribed officers in the group’s operating companies.

Noach will join the board of Discovery Health in a non-executive capacity from January “in line with the longstanding tradition of retaining the collective institutional knowledge and expertise of past leadership”.

ALSO READ: Healthcare leaders reiterate NHI Bill concerns

This article is republished from Moneyweb under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.