Stiver

I. FACTS AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND1

A. Stiver’s Employment CHOMP is a nonprofit hospital in Monterey County. Montage is the parent company of CHOMP. Montage oversees CHOMP, CHOMP’s Tyler Heart Institute, and other medical facilities on the Monterey Peninsula. Stiver is a “cardiac technolog[ist].” In 2007, CHOMP hired Stiver as a cardiology supervisor at the Tyler Heart Institute. Stiver’s position was 80 percent management and 20 percent clinical, during which time he worked in the operating room during heart surgeries. Stiver supervised approximately 30 individuals, including ultrasound technologists, nurses, and administrative assistants. Over the next 10 years, Stiver received positive performance evaluations and was given additional duties and oversight of other programs in the Tyler Heart Institute. He twice assumed interim assistant director duties for the Tyler Heart Institute’s catheterization laboratory, initially in 2012, and again in late 2017 through early 2018. While serving as interim assistant director in October 2017, Stiver discovered irregularities related to the tracking and billing of “trunk stock” (devices received directly from medical device company…