UC Health Retirement Plan

UC Health Retirement Plan

The UC Health Retirement Plan is the defined-benefit and defined-contribution vehicle for UCHealth, the nonprofit health system spun from the University of Colorado in 2012. UCHealth employs roughly 37,000 people across Colorado, including its flagship University of Colorado Hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. The plan pools the retirement assets of its clinical and administrative workforce, a pool that grew in tandem with the health system's expansion through affiliations with Poudre Valley Health System and Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs. The plan allocates across a conventional institutional mix: public equities, fixed income, and alternatives, but a distinguishing feature is the weight of Colorado real estate. UCHealth holds a medical office portfolio of 11 facilities, along with commercial properties at 131 N. Madison St. and 115–123 Madison St. in Denver, plus undeveloped land parcels in Broomfield. The retirement plan's exposure to hard assets in its own operating geography makes it an atypical health-system investor — capital is tied to the same Front Range corridor that drives its patient volumes. The plan operates without a dedicated public investment team; oversight rests with UCHealth's CFO, Todd Hofheins, and the system's finance committee. UCHealth does not publish a standalone retirement-plan annual report, so total assets under management remain undisclosed. Adjacent to the plan, UCHealth maintains corporate investment portfolios that include allocations to the CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, a venture vehicle run in partnership with Children's Hospital Colorado, and has engaged in a strategic collaboration with Verily, Alphabet's life-sciences unit, for AI-powered research and care-model transformation. May 2024: The Memorial Hospital Foundation, a philanthropic arm tied to the UCHealth system, reported granting cycles aligned with workforce housing and behavioral health — categories that echo the system's owned real-estate strategy. UCHealth's retirement assets are governed alongside its hospital balance sheet, not within a separated investment office. This structure means plan-level decisions are filtered through operating-company priorities — a cash-flow lens that differs from the liability-driven investing frameworks typical of standalone corporate pensions. The plan's locked-in Colorado real estate and its proximity to CU Anschutz academic medical assets create a natural moat: few plan sponsors of comparable size hold so much direct property in a single high-growth region.