By Michele Dula Baum
Diane Holder, MS, has left fingerprints nearly everywhere during a distinguished 40-year career in Pittsburgh’s health care industry. And she’s still giving.
She retired as president and CEO of the UPMC Health Plan; president, UPMC Insurance Services Division; and executive vice president of UPMC effective January 1 yet retains a strong presence on local not-for-profit boards, including the University of Pittsburgh Institute of Politics, and chairs the School of Public Health’s Board of Visitors. She also serves as immediate past chair of the Heinz History Center, where she is the first woman to chair the board since its founding in 1879. She continues to provide consultative and advisory services to a variety of health care organizations.
She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from Columbia University yet feels “very much a part of the Pitt family,” she says, thanks in no small part to her husband, Gerald Holder, PhD, Swanson School of Engineering dean emeritus.
“Watching Jerry build the engineering school to an amazing height—he was dean for 22 years—I felt part of the Pitt family a long time ago,” Holder says.
Additional training in the psychiatric epidemiology graduate program at Pitt Public Health deepened her appreciation and understanding of the critical public health issues facing our nation and influenced her approach to building clinical delivery services and eventually creating health insurance programs.
Holder definitely absorbed her public health lessons, serving as an adjunct professor of health policy and management for more than 20 years. “The training I received in public health influenced how I think about the world and reinforced my belief in systemic influences on health outcomes,” she says.
Indeed, key public health concepts of learning, innovation and service are central to Holder’s philosophy, both professionally and personally.
“I started my career in Pittsburgh before UPMC was officially launched, spending the first 20 years with Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic (WPIC) and the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine—about two-thirds of that time running Western Psychiatric clinical programs and then as president of WPIC,” adds Holder.
As UPMC was forming, the learning opportunities soon came quickly as the organization expanded and diversified. “Being part of a strategic leadership group helped me think about the big picture for what is possible and consider questions like how to significantly improve health care delivery and how to translate best practices from what we learned in academic research into clinical practice," she says.
Her role afforded an inside view not only of UPMC's growing component parts but also of the importance of building the critical relationships necessary to forge UPMC's clinical expertise with the research strengths of Pitt and it's six health sciences schools.
"They are two separate, but strongly aligned organizations that have to meet their own separate goals but, together, their strength is tremendous," says Holder. "It was always of paramount importance that the schools and UPMC continue to strengthen their exceptional relationship to deliver on their aligned missions."
Holder soon found other ways to lead the expansion of organizational alignment to improve health care in the Pittsburgh region. 
"Over the course of my career, I felt that every few years I had a completely new job that was interesting and meaningful in a very mission-driven organization," she says. "It was exciting for me to be able to diversify what I could do." When UPMC began exploring how to launch health insurance programs to better serve their patients and address affordability of health care, Holder was a key member of the team.
She was the founding CEO of Community Care Behavioral Health, which today is the largest not-for-profit behavioral health managed care company in the nation serving over 1.5 million Medicaid members. She also led the rapid growth of UPMC's health insurance and benefit-management division. By the time she retired, UPMC served over 4 million members and top line UPMC insurance revenue was approaching $20 billion annually.
She also led a UPMC effort with the Advisory Board Company to create Evolent, a health management company, and an original director helped to take the company public. Evolent opened on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of over $1 billion and became one of the UPMC's most significant commercialization efforts to date.
Her interest in facilitating the translation of best practices in health care also inspired her to create the UPMC Center for High Value Health Care, which has secured numerous awards from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute and other national funders in collaboration with the Pitt schools of the health sciences and community partners.
All of these efforts arguably hearken to her public health mindset.
"We think broadly about the things that impact people's lives—not simply the genes they're born with, the families they grew up in or the communities they live in but how the things come together," she says.
"What was great, actually, was the ability to impact health care delivery and financing in the context of knowing that the services are really going to help people and make a difference in their lives."
Holder continues to help people through her volunteer board service and gifts to the University and favored charitable organizations.
"At this point in my life, the things that matter to me are how I can contribute some of the expertise or assets I have in ways to make an impact," she says. "How do we support these organizations and institutions that, in my opinion, are largely responsible for saving Pittsburgh over the past 40 years—for bringing the 'eds and meds' to fruition to replace some of the early manufacturing losses we had that were quite devastating?"
UPMC and Pitt will no doubt continue to generate important and lasting change throughout the region, nation and world, she says.
Holder has been recognized often as a community and health care leader, including one of the nation's "100 Most Influential People in Health Care" by Modern Healthcare; a "Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania" by former Gov. Tom Wolf; an "Athena" awardee for her support and mentorship of women leaders from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development; "The Fred Rogers Good Neighbor" awardee for community service; "A Lifetime Career" awardee from the Pittsburgh Business Times; and a "Women Who Make a Difference" awardee by the International Women's Forum.
The best part of retirement, she notes, is finding more time for her three grown children and their families, including "seven amazing grandchildren!"