Albany

State Health Commissioner Dr. Nirav Shah, the man at the center of growing frustration over the state's failure to rule on a controversial form of gas drilling, is telling people he will leave his post in June, a state official said.

Shah, a Buffalo native, is leaving to become senior vice president and chief operating officer for clinical operations for the southern California region of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, the official said.

Shah's pressing business will be handed off to Dr. Howard Zucker, who joined the Department of Health as first deputy commissioner in September after working as a professor of anesthesiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist at Montefiore Medical Center.

Zucker's portfolio will include the agency's 18-month review of the potential health impacts of the gas-drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking.

That review began in September 2012 with no set end date.

Shah's departure is said to have been in the works for some time, and he began notifying people of his decision on Tuesday night, the official said.

But news of it broke on the same day that Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino called on him to step down over the Health Department's alleged lax approach to inspecting abortion clinics and over Shah's refusal to say when the department's hydrofracking review will be complete.

Amid mounting frustration from pro-fracking interests who insist Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration is squandering the chance to capitalize on the economic boom of shale gas drilling, Shah has insisted the study will take as long as is necessary and will be transparent "at the end, not during" — a statement that only further incensed his critics.

Shah is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale School of Medicine. He was tapped for the post shortly after Cuomo took office in January 2011. He came to the job having studied ways to improve care by digitizing patients' medical records.

To that end, the state budget adopted last week by the Legislature includes $65 million to continue the development of a statewide electronic medical records system.