Tamm Kritzer named new senior vice president of hospital operations at Essentia Health-St. Mary’s Medical Center

Throughout her tenure at Essentia Health, Tamm Kritzer has affected meaningful change that allows us to better serve our patients and communities.

Essentia is proud to announce that Kritzer’s next role with the organization will be senior vice president of hospital operations at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth. Kritzer takes over for Jan Schade, who retired Friday, April 5, after successfully helping to navigate St. Mary’s through the COVID-19 pandemic while a new hospital was being built via the Vision Northland project.

“I am deeply committed to the Essentia mission and am excited to engage and partner with others to deliver on that mission,” Kritzer said. “The new St. Mary’s hospital provides an opportunity to innovate and transform how we deliver high-quality health care in a sustainable manner.”

Kritzer has more than 30 years of experience in health care. She joined Essentia in 2019, supporting our practices in northwest Wisconsin, the Arrowhead region and Itasca Lakes. In that capacity, she was instrumental in improving care — and enhancing access to that care — in many of the small towns Essentia is privileged to serve.

“I am passionate about rural health care,” she said. “I grew up in rural Minnesota and I am excited to be a catalyst to bring innovation and creative problem-solving to our teams.”

At the new St. Mary’s, Kritzer will oversee a hospital with 344 rooms — 342 of which are private — and the region’s only Level I Adult Trauma Center. It opened last July following completion of a four-year, $900 million project that added 942,000 square feet of new and renovated space to our downtown campus.

Kritzer earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and a bachelor of arts degree in health information management from the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.