HCA Healthcare names long-time analyst to lead IR role

HCA Healthcare, a leading provider of hospitals and other services, has named Frank Morgan as its new vice president of investor relations, effective January 1, 2022.

Morgan, who has covered the healthcare industry as a financial analyst for more than 30 years, joins the Nashville-based company from RBC Capital Markets where he served as managing director of healthcare services research. He will succeed Mark Kimbrough, who is retiring in March 2022 after almost 40 years with HCA Healthcare.

‘Frank is well known and well respected by the investment community, having covered the facility-based healthcare services sector for many years,’ says HCA Healthcare executive vice president and CFO Bill Rutherford in a statement. ‘His familiarity with the healthcare industry and our company will serve him well, and we look forward to welcoming him to HCA Healthcare.’

Morgan has been with RBC since 2008, joining from a role as managing director and senior analyst at Jefferies and Company. A chartered financial analyst, Morgan ‘has earned national recognition for his research and coverage of the medical care sector,’ says HCA. He has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and an MBA from the University of Alabama.

As well as welcoming Morgan to the company, Rutherford also thanked Kimbrough for his near four-decades of service: ‘Mark is highly respected among the investor community. He has built strong and enduring relationships on behalf of HCA Healthcare during the many years he has served as our company’s primary contact for investors and analysts,’ he says. Kimbrough joined HCA’s internal audit department in 1982, holding various positions across operations, home care, senior living services and development before joining the firm’s IR department in 1986.

He became assistant vice president of investor relations in 1997 before being promoted to vice president of investor relations in 2000. Between 2006 to 2011, HCA Healthcare was a privately held company and during that time Kimbrough served as vice president of real estate.

Kimbrough returned to investor relations when HCA Healthcare went public in 2011, in a listing on the NYSE that raised $3.79 bn and became, at the time, the largest US private-equity backed IPO in history.

HCA Healthcare operates 183 hospitals and some 2,000 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, freestanding emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and physician clinics across 20 states and in the UK.

The company, which was founded in 1968, describes itself as ‘a learning health system that uses its more than 32 mn annual patient encounters to advance science, improve patient care and save lives,’ citing examples of successful clinical studies, ‘including one that demonstrated that full-term delivery is healthier than early elective delivery of babies and another that identified a clinical protocol that can reduce bloodstream infections in ICU patients by 44 percent’.