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PeaceHealth will cut 119 jobs in Clark County as part of a 150-position statewide layoff, the health system confirmed on Sept. 18, most of them information-technology roles based at the system’s Vancouver shared-services operation. The cuts, filed in a state WARN notice dated Sept. 17, take effect Nov. 20.
The work is being outsourced to Tech Mahindra, an India-based technology contractor, through its U.S. healthcare subsidiary The HCI Group, according to reporting confirmed by both The Columbian and Portland’s KOIN. PeaceHealth told Becker’s Hospital Review it expects fewer than 250 employees to be affected systemwide once the outsourcing is complete — the company put that figure at under 1.5% of its roughly 16,000-person workforce.
Vancouver is absorbing the overwhelming majority of the pain. Of the 150 positions eliminated statewide, 119 sit in Clark County, where PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center anchors the system’s Washington footprint and houses much of its IT and shared-services staff. The remaining positions are spread across other Washington sites, including Bellingham, and a small number in Oregon.
This is not PeaceHealth’s first round of cuts this year. In February, the system laid off 94 employees statewide, including 46 in Clark County — also tied to IT restructuring. Between late December 2025 and mid-January, PeaceHealth notified the state of 241 positions eliminated across Washington, with dozens based in Bellingham. Add September’s 150, and PeaceHealth has notified Washington of nearly 500 job cuts since December, a pattern of recurring, IT-heavy layoffs that keeps landing hardest on the Vancouver campus.
PeaceHealth Southwest, at 400 N.E. Mother Joseph Place, is Clark County’s largest hospital and one of its largest employers. A loss of 119 positions there does not show up as empty hospital beds — patients should not expect to see fewer nurses at the bedside — but it does show up in the county’s professional and technical job base, an employment segment already strained by a wave of tech and back-office layoffs across the Portland-Vancouver metro this year. IT and shared-services jobs tend to pay above the county median, meaning the loss is concentrated among the kind of white-collar positions that Clark County’s push to diversify its economy beyond retail and warehousing was supposed to protect.
What’s less visible in PeaceHealth’s own statements is who, exactly, is losing a job. The health system’s public comments have centered on the percentage of its workforce affected and the identity of its new vendor — not on the workers themselves, their tenure, or their severance terms. No PeaceHealth executive has yet answered, on the record, how many of the 119 Clark County positions belong to employees who have worked at the Vancouver campus for a decade or more, information that matters to a county trying to gauge how deep this cut runs into its own workforce rather than a distant corporate ledger. Reporting to date has not surfaced a formal statement from a union representing the affected IT and shared-services staff, though PeaceHealth workers elsewhere in the system have had union representation in past layoff rounds.
The Nov. 20 effective date gives affected employees roughly two months’ notice from the WARN filing — the minimum required under Washington’s 60-day notification law. PeaceHealth has not said whether affected Clark County employees will be offered transfers to clinical or non-outsourced administrative roles elsewhere in the system, or whether the severance package matches what was offered in February’s smaller round.
Clark County officials have not issued a public response to the layoff notice as of this writing. The county’s Department of Community Services, which tracks major workforce dislocations for state rapid-response services, has not announced whether it will offer job-transition assistance to the affected workers, as it has done after past mass layoffs in the county.
Sources: The Columbian, KOIN, Becker’s Hospital Review, The Columbian
