The chief operating officer at Fairview Health Services is departing next month, roughly one year after he was named to the second highest job at the Minneapolis-based network of hospitals and clinics.

M. Osman Akhtar is leaving to pursue a job outside of traditional health care that will nonetheless "bring technology and health care together," Fairview said in a disclosure to bondholders last week. A spokesman at Fairview, which is one of the state's largest operators of hospitals and clinics, didn't offer more details on Monday.

Laura Reed, the health system's chief nursing executive and president for acute care hospitals, will take a new job that combines the chief nursing job with the position of chief operating officer.

"This is a role Laura has held in another organization and one she is well-equipped to assume for our health system," said chief executive James Hereford in a statement.

Fairview Health Services includes the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis and Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina. The nonprofit group employs 32,000 people and also runs a large pharmacy division and long-term care facilities.

Akhtar was one of the executives who's been leading a change at Fairview so that hospitals and clinics are managed in terms of service lines, rather than geography. The goal is to make it easier for patients to get care across the growing health care system.

He also worked on "primary care transformation," Hereford said, and ongoing negotiations about Fairview's partnership with the U.

"All of these efforts are on solid ground and we have strong momentum and a talented team in place to bring them to resolution," Hereford said in a statement.

Akhtar was one of three senior executives brought in at Fairview following its June 2017 merger with St. Paul-based HealthEast. In a financial statement this month, Fairview reported $57.9 million in operating income during the first six months of the year on $2.8 billion in revenue.

Fairview is in the midst of a construction project at the U hospital that includes new space for the hospital's emergency department plus two new high-tech operating rooms. Fairview's board of directors approved last year a capital investment of $111.6 million for a project that's expected to stretch into 2020.

Christopher Snowbeck • 612-673-4744 Twitter: @chrissnowbeck