CWU alum becomes CEO of hospital in the Columbia Gorge

Two-time Central Washington University graduate Matt Kollman recently took over as the new CEO of Skyline Hospital in Klickitat County.

Kollman, who holds a BS in exercise physiology (’01) and an MS in clinical physiology (’03) from CWU, was recently featured in the Columbia Gorge News.

When he went to CWU to pursue his undergraduate degree in the late 1990s, Kollman thought he would be working toward a career in forensic psychology. While pursuing his master’s degree, he served as a research assistant and coordinated a research project in Bend, Oregon, and eventually wound up working as a researcher for Madrona Medical Group in Bellingham.

But that career path didn’t suit him very well, so he transitioned to health care in 2007. In his bio on a former employer’s website, Kollman admitted he didn’t always anticipate a career in health care leadership.

“I sometimes say my career was a bit of an accident,” he said. “It was kind of an accident just because I didn’t set out to be in health care, but they kept asking me to do more.”

After spending the previous 16 years in the Yakima Valley—12 of them with Memorial Physicians—Kollman and his family decided to see what life was like in the much smaller town of White Salmon, which is home to Skyline Hosptial.

“My family and I first came to the area on a trip during the pandemic and rented a vacation home in Husum,” he said in the article. “We had been wanting to move to a smaller community for a while, looking all over the Northwest. Then, this opportunity came up and now we live about a block from the house we rented.”

The primary challenge for Skyline in recruiting and retaining staff is the cost of living in White Salmon and the Columbia Gorge region, where real estate values now mirror the much-larger Portland and Seattle markets.

“It’s really expensive out here, and we have people that want to come and work here, but they ultimately pull out of the process due to the cost of housing,” said Kollman, who served as vice president and chief operating officer for Yakima Valley Memorial Physicians—later known as Virginia Mason Memorial—from 2014-19.

Kollman then took a two-year detour into the hops industry, serving as finance director and VP for business administration for Yakima Chief Hops. He most recently served as chief operating officer at Yakima Neighborhood Health Services from early 2022 until last summer, and also held the same role at Comprehensive Healthcare from 2021-22.