Healthcare CEO Accused of Blog Plagiarism

In March 2024, the Baystate Health Board of Trustees announced that Peter Banko would become CEO of Baystate, taking office in June. The biggest health care system in Western Massachusetts, Baystate, is a non-profit encompassing four hospitals and 13,000 employees.

However, in recent months, the organization has faced financial difficulties, including multiple rounds of layoffs.

To boost employee morale, Banko began posting to an internal blog named Connect, which was available only to Baystate employees. From July 2024 to today, he has posted dozens of blog posts on topics ranging from the importance of honesty to offering business lessons and observations of public figures.

However, according to one anonymous employee, many of the posts contained plagiarized content. According to an article written by Jonathan Saltzman and Maren Halpin at the Boston Globe, more than 20 posts featured plagiarized passages.

The plagiarized content came from various sources, including Forbes, ESPN, NPR and other websites. The sources also ranged widely in publication date, from weeks to decades old.

Banko declined to comment on the allegations. Baystate issued a statement saying in part that, “metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas are referenced [in Banko’s blog] to make the content relatable and tangible.”

For their part, the anonymous employee has filed a complaint with Baystate’s compliance department. Regarding that complaint, Baystate said they have “discussed and addressed the matter with our President and CEO.”

Still, it’s a bad look for an already embattled CEO, but it’s a mistake that could have been avoided easily.

Understanding the Plagiarism

We don’t have much information about the plagiarism itself. Though the Boston Globe article says that over 20 articles are involved, it only provides two examples.

This is likely due to the nature of the alleged plagiarized work. Since the blog is only available internally, the paper likely has limited access to the content and is comfortable publishing even less.

The two examples they provide are relatively short, roughly a paragraph in length. Both examples show evidence of rewriting, but in both cases, several sentences are left intact, completely verbatim.

On one hand, it would be easy to dismiss these overlaps as poor paraphrasing. We’ve seen similar passages in the recent Pete Hegseth allegations and many of the DEI-related ones.

However, in those cases, the rewriting was much more thorough, if still flawed, and there was some attempt to cite the source. Here, no such effort was made.

That’s made all the worse because attribution in a blog post is often nothing more than a link. It would have been trivial to include attribution to these sources, which all appear to be public websites.

But that leads to perhaps the biggest question in this story—why did he plagiarize? It was completely unnecessary.

The Least Necessary Plagiarism

Regardless of how serious or trivial the plagiarism is, it’s offset by a simple problem: Banko had no reason to plagiarize.

First, he was not required to have a blog. In fact, it doesn’t seem that the blog was widely loved by its readers. One employee posting on Reddit said, “As an employee, these blog posts are tone-deaf, degrading and childish to the staff working under him.”

But if he felt the need to have a blog, he could have followed the path of many other CEOs and hired a ghostwriter. While that’s still possible in this case, Baystate’s response indicates that’s not what happened here.

Speaking of Baystate’s response, it is completely unhelpful in this situation. This is not a case about “metaphors, analogies, pop culture trends and other ideas.” It is about verbatim and near-verbatim plagiarism. The response not only fails to take ownership of the issue, but gets the issue completely wrong.

As “tone deaf” as the blog may have been, the response to the plagiarism scandal has been even more so. And that may be the biggest problem of all.

Show Us You Don’t Care

In the fall of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rash of plagiarism scandals involving universities and schools. Schools were forced to write difficult letters announcing program cuts, scheduling changes and other issues.

Several schools opted to copy and paste the work of other schools. While the temptation to plagiarize is understandable, these messages were also meant to be personal and heartfelt. The plagiarism proved they were anything but.

Perhaps the worst example was Michael Muñoz. He was the superintendent of the Rochester Public School District in Rochester, Minnesota. In November 2020, he sent a personal letter to the district’s staff thanking them for their hard work. However, the letter turned out to be heavily plagiarized.

He was ultimately suspended for five days without pay and resigned the following year.

In both Muñoz’s and Banko’s cases, the plagiarism takes what was meant to be personal outreach and makes it feel fake. In Banko’s case, the issue is even worse, as he plagiarized in an article meant to tout the importance of honesty.

Banko was already struggling with employee perception, and this isn’t likely to help matters at all.

Bottom Line

Right now, we have no way of knowing how serious this issue is. With only a couple of examples, there’s just no way to find out.

This makes Baystate’s next actions all the more critical. Baystate could handle this issue with transparency and disclose both what happened and what response they are taking. It would do a great deal to restore both public and employee confidence.

But it seems that’s not what will happen. Baystate claims they have already “discussed and addressed the matter,” but does not indicate what that entails. They also haven’t said what, if anything, they’ll do differently in the future.

In the end, this case is a stark reminder of the importance of using proper citation and paraphrasing techniques in all your work, including anything meant to be internal-only.

It also highlights the importance of checking your work for plagiarism before publishing it. The time it takes to perform such a check and edit out any issues is minuscule compared to the time it takes to address a problem after the fact.

Ultimately, regardless of how serious this case ends up being, it was completely unnecessary. There was no reason for any amount of plagiarism. If Banko didn’t value this work or feel it was important, he didn’t have to do it.

It’s a scandal that Banko brought upon himself.