There were plenty of verbal shots fired in the yearslong negotiations to reach an operating agreement among the University of Minnesota, M Physicians, and Fairview Health Services.

After a three-person mediation team persuaded the three parties in January to finally forge a new 10-year agreement, it was time to start moving beyond the conflict.

A key actor in the relationship healing process is Dr. Greg Beilman, who became CEO of University of Minnesota Physicians (M Physicians) in mid-February after taking on that role in an interim capacity in July. He leads the clinical practice of the University of Minnesota Medical School, which is comprised of about 1,500 physicians, 2,500 staff, and 550 advanced practice providers, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

Beilman, a critical care and trauma surgeon, now spends some of his time interacting with the Minnesota Legislature. While appearing before a Minnesota Senate committee in late February, Beilman testified that it was absolutely necessary that the U of M administration, Fairview, and M Physicians struck a deal when they did.

He warned that failure to do so could have led to the contraction of health care services and patient access to U of M physicians. “We’d face a $400 million reduction in revenue—funds that pay for the salaries of our doctors,” Beilman told the committee. “That could have led to a 30 to 50% loss in faculty to other universities outside of Minnesota or health care systems that could pay them.”

In a recent interview with Twin Cities Business, Beilman talked about the new agreement, retaining and recruiting doctors, how the medical school’s physicians serve patients across the Upper Midwest, and what he hopes to accomplish in his new position.

Beilman, a U of M Medical School faculty member for three decades, has built a reputation for getting results. That track record was well-known when the physicians group turned to him to become interim CEO last summer, a time when a deal with the U of M administration and Fairview remained elusive.

Recruitment and retention of physicians

As three-party negotiations dragged on, increasing physician departures from the U of M Medical School became an urgent issue that Beilman wanted to address.

“We saw an uptick in the number of physicians leaving our practice in 2024 and 2025, and so that was a concern for me,” Beilman said. He prioritized negotiating a bilateral deal with Fairview last year, because he wanted to stabilize the physician practice.

“I want to call out Attorney General [Keith] Ellison for being willing to engage in this work and to help facilitate this work,” Beilman said. In his role as the state’s attorney general, Ellison had been trying to get the three parties to reach a deal. But he supported talks between Fairview and M Physicians when they were at odds with University of Minnesota President Rebecca Cunningham and her administration.

“Anybody who takes a job wants to know that he or she will have a job next year, too,” Beilman said. “Given the uncertainty of the negotiations with Fairview and the tensions between our [M Physicians] practice plan and the university, many of our physicians were disheartened by that lack of stability or apparent lack of stability.”

When Beilman was named the M Physicians CEO in mid-February, he was characterized by Dr. Rahel Ghebre, vice chair of the M Physicians board, as a “steadfast servant-leader for the University of Minnesota Medical School and Minnesota’s patients.”

His role in helping secure a new operating agreement also was highlighted. “Under Dr. Beilman’s leadership, M Physicians announced a new 10-year clinical partnership with Fairview Health Services in November,” the M Physicians news release said. “The ‘Strategic Partnership for Minnesota’s Healthcare Future’ secures patients access to university doctors in Fairview hospitals and clinics, and it sustains future funding for the University of Minnesota Medical School, the majority of which is provided by M Physicians. The partnership also includes a minimum of $50 million in mission support from Fairview for the Medical School and $1 billion in new investments for University of Minnesota Medical Center.”

President Cunningham and the University of Minnesota Board of Regents complained publicly about the two parties electing to do an agreement without the U of M administration.

Ellison quickly concluded that the three parties needed mediation help to reach a deal. He asked Thomas Fraser, a retired Hennepin County District Court judge, to serve as the mediator. He also enlisted Dr. Bill McGuire and Lois Quam, both veteran UnitedHealth Group executives, to serve as coequal consultants during the mediation process.

“I don’t know how we came up with these three,” Beilman said, but he emphasized their involvement was critical to the success of the negotiations. “Each of these mediators had skill sets that allowed them to effectively communicate with the parties and help the parties come together,” he said.

Doctors as ‘franchise players’

In the national and international competition for medical talent, Beilman said he wanted to ensure that “franchise players” would continue to find a home at the U of M Medical School.

“We have a number of high-performing physicians who are really good at taking translational findings and putting them into patient care,” Beilman said. He’s referring to applying breakthroughs in research to patient care to improve people’s health.

“Minnesota has had a history of doing that,” he said. “Think about the whole history of cardiac surgery. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a lot of it was developed at the University of Minnesota. Transplant surgery is another great example.”

University of Minnesota physicians continue to innovate. “That innovation is driven by these—I’m almost hesitant to say it—crazy, driven people who believe that they can make a difference for patients using new technology,” he said.

Beilman stressed that the U of M Medical School has several passionate physicians who are pursuing new treatments and technology. “What I really worried about last year was the loss of those people,” he said. “They’re highly recruited to go to other institutions where they can be successful. So, it doesn’t take the loss of too many of those [physicians] to really affect your overall function of a program.”

The fear about program degradation that Beilman felt last year has turned to optimism in 2026. “I’m happy to say that, with the work that we’ve done with our Fairview colleagues, I believe that we have helped our physicians feel stable about the future with this 10-year agreement,” he said. “I’m hoping to help these franchise players feel like they can continue to be able to innovate, to do a better job of taking care of patients in the environment that we’re working on creating for them.”

Beilman’s CEO priorities

In his CEO role, Beilman has three overarching priorities. At the top of his list is operationalizing the new agreement with Fairview, which has been a partner with U of M physicians for 30 years. “We now have an agreement that gives us a map for the next decade,” he said. Fairview, he added, is the major clinical partner of M Physicians and a “major supporter of the mission of the medical school.”

His second priority is “thinking about what our practice plan should be in the future and how do we adapt to the coming realities moving forward.”

His third priority involves serving patients in a large geographic area. “Part three is understanding how to better partner with our partners throughout the state and the Upper Midwest,” Beilman said.

“Fairview is our largest clinical partner, but we partner with 50 other systems across the state of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest,” he said. “I would like to be exploring opportunities with these other partners about how to do a better job of service.”

A majority of the 1,500 or so physicians who are part of M Physicians live in the Twin Cities area. However, Beilman said, some of the doctors live in and are based in communities across Minnesota.

“The best example of that is our partnership with CentraCare,” he said. “We have about a dozen orthopedic surgeons who live in the St. Cloud community who deliver orthopedic surgery care to patients in St. Cloud and the region and work in the CentraCare [operated] hospital.”

M Physicians serves about 1.2 million patients a year. “Those include people referred from all over the Upper Midwest for care at our central academic footprint—East Bank, West Bank, the Children’s Hospital, and the clinics, and surgery center—but also our physicians and advanced practice providers do care in many communities in person,” Beilman said.

“Our care goes everywhere,” he said. “Let’s take pediatric cardiology. It’s not unusual for one of our specialists to get in a car or get on a plane to fly to North Dakota, evaluate patients for a day, and then fly home. It provides that specialty care that’s not otherwise available to patients.”

Patients, research, and the military

Beilman grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and earned his M.D. from the University of Kansas School of Medicine. After completing a residency in general surgery in Kansas, he landed a fellowship in surgical critical care at the U of M.

He got to train with Dr. Frank Cerra, who twice served as dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School.

“One of my mentors in Wichita, who had trained here [in Minnesota], pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Greg, you’re a bit of an oddball. You need to go to the University of Minnesota. They like oddballs there,’ ” Beilman recalled. “What he was saying is that we respect diversity of opinion, diversity of background, and people who think outside the box. I have had an amazing 30-year career because of the environment at the University of Minnesota and the practice of medicine that we have. My goal as the CEO of our organization is to make that possible for people over the next 30 years, too.”

After seeing Beilman’s approach to medicine and learning, Cerra offered him a job, and he elected to stay in Minnesota. Beilman and his wife, also a physician, raised their two children in Minnesota.

“What I came to the University of Minnesota to do back in 1994 was to be a doctor, to take care of really sick people and be an academic,” Beilman said. “For me, it was studying septic shock and hemorrhagic shock and understanding how to improve the care for people with those conditions. That’s what brings the majority of our doctors to the university. It’s both the clinical mission of taking care of patients and the academic mission of either teaching or doing research or doing translational work to improve patient care.”

While Beilman formed long-term relationships with the U of M and patients in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest, he also delivered health care in military settings. Beilman retired as a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves in 2014. In deployments to Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, he led trauma care for service members.

“The last four years, before I stepped into the CEO role, I was serving as the associate dean for DoD [Department of Defense] research and partnerships,” Beilman said. “Much of the work that I was doing was trying to leverage technology to improve care for people in a rural setting. In a war, people are going to be a long way from definitive care. It’s not a surprise that in the state of Minnesota, many people live a long way from definitive care.”

Through the new operating agreement with Fairview and in his new CEO role, Beilman hopes to continue to strengthen the health care that people receive in rural areas.

Beilman embraces work in high-pressure environments, such as operating rooms and war zones. In 2020, he also served as co-lead of the M Health Fairview Covid-19 Command Center.

Not a candidate for Medical School dean

Dr. Jakub Tolar, veteran dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School, will leave Minnesota at the end of the current academic year to become president and CEO for the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

When asked whether he would become a candidate for the U of M Medical School dean position, Beilman simply said “no.”

He already has a big job in his role as CEO of M Physicians, and those new responsibilities have modified how he spends his time.

To fulfill his CEO duties, Beilman has reduced the amount of time he spends each week treating patients and doing surgery. One of his younger colleagues has taken over much of his research work.

“What has sustained me through my amazing 30-year career has been taking care of people day after day,” Beilman said. “I have managed to keep a half a day a week of clinic [work]. I managed to keep a day a week in the operating room.”

Because he’s adjusting to his new CEO role, Beilman quipped, “I frequently walk into meetings after a clinic [seeing patients] and say, ‘Well, I had a half a day of knowing what the hell I’m doing.’ ”

Currently, he’s trying to focus on elective surgeries. “A lot of what I have done over the last two decades is surgery for people with chronic abdominal pain from pancreatitis,” he said.

“Most recently, our research was focused on how to develop better systems of care for people who are in a rural setting,” he said. He was working with people in EMS systems in southwest and northeast Minnesota. The purpose was to “identify bringing new technology to providers in the pre-hospital setting, so tele-EMS,” he said.

Research also involved understanding the “shortcomings and problems with pre-hospital care with trauma, heart disease, and stroke.”

While Beilman long has been a healer with patients, he’s now applying another form of healing with others in professional capacities.

With the University of Minnesota administration and Board of Regents, Beilman said, “I continue to be committed to rebuilding a relationship that has struggled a bit over the last year.”

He expressed support for Dr. Carol Bradford, the interim dean of the medical school and interim executive vice president for health affairs, and the “role that she’s going to play in helping that [relationship building] take place,” Beilman said.