Eric Cecava

Managing quality across multiple facilities exposes the gap between system averages and what is actually happening on the ground Quality in healthcare is often measured at the system level and managed at the facility level, which creates a specific kind of problem. The system-level metric looks one way. The facility-level reality looks another. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, who progressed from System Director of Process Excellence to VP of Regional Operations and Quality to Chief Operating Officer at Adena Health System in Ohio before taking on executive leadership at McLaren Port Huron in Michigan, has spent his career navigating exactly this gap. System Averages Hide Site-Level Problems When quality metrics are aggregated at the system level, what gets reported is an average. That average can look acceptable when one facility is performing well and another is underperforming, because the strong site compensates for the weak one in the aggregate number. That situation is inv...

Hospitals and medical groups require different management instincts, and most executives discover this at the worst possible time An integrated medical group is not a hospital department. It is not a collection of private practice physicians who happen to have an employment relationship with a health system. It is a distinct organizational entity that requires its own management approach, its own performance infrastructure, and its own leadership culture. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, whose operational responsibilities at both Adena Health System in Ohio and McLaren Port Huron in Michigan included integrated medical groups, has a clear view of what makes the difference between a medical group that functions well and one that is a persistent management challenge. Employed Physicians Are Not Hospital Staff The most common mistake health system leaders make when managing an integrated medical group is treating employed physicians the same way they treat hospital operations staff...

The jump from running operations to running an enterprise teaches things about leadership that the job description does not capture Most health system CEOs arrived at that title by way of a COO role, and most of them will tell you that the transition taught them something they did not expect. The work is different in ways that are not obvious from the outside. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, who served as Chief Operating Officer at Adena Health System in Ohio, then as COO and later President and CEO of McLaren Port Huron in Michigan, has a specific view of what that transition actually changes. The COO Owns What Happens Inside. The CEO Is Accountable for Everything. As COO, Cecava's accountability was operational. He was responsible for how the hospital functioned, how the skilled nursing facility performed, how the medical group was managed, and how quality and financial metrics tracked against targets. Those are significant responsibilities, but they are bounded. The oper...

Regional health systems that treat physician engagement as a recruitment function are building a problem that will surface years later There is a conversation that happens regularly in regional health system leadership circles about the physician shortage, the recruitment challenges, and the difficulty of building a medical staff that meets the needs of a defined geographic area. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, who managed physician recruitment and contracting at McLaren Port Huron across a three-county service area in Michigan, thinks this conversation is asking the right question in the wrong frame. The problem most systems have is not physician recruitment. It is physician relations. Recruitment Is a Transaction. Relations Is a Culture. A health system that recruits physicians well but manages them poorly ends up in a cycle: attractive offers bring people in, inadequate engagement drives them out, and the gap that existed before the recruitment process ended up back where it...

The process improvement methodology built for factory floors turns out to be just as useful when the waste you are eliminating affects patient outcomes Lean Six Sigma was developed in manufacturing. Its vocabulary comes from Toyota: value streams, waste, pull systems, standard work. Its statistical rigor comes from Motorola's Six Sigma program, designed to reduce defects in electronic components. It is not language that sounds natural in a clinical environment. Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, who led Lean Six Sigma deployment at Adena Health System in Ohio and applied process improvement principles throughout his work at McLaren Port Huron in Michigan, is more interested in what the methodology produces than in how it sounds. Waste in Healthcare Looks Different Than Waste in Manufacturing In a manufacturing context, waste is visible and physical: inventory sitting in a warehouse, material being reworked, equipment waiting for a part. In healthcare, waste is often embedded i...

How a career in industrial engineering and plant operations turned out to be useful preparation for running a hospital in Michigan Eric Cecava of Fort Gratiot, Michigan, did not start in healthcare. He graduated from Purdue University with a degree in industrial engineering, earned an MBA from The Ohio State University, and spent the first part of his career at Delphi Automotive and then Honeywell International, managing lean production systems and supply chain operations for consumer products facilities across the Midwest. Healthcare came later. The path to it, in retrospect, prepared him for it in ways that a more direct route might not have. Starting in Manufacturing Was Not a Detour Industrial engineering is fundamentally about how work flows: where it slows, where it doubles back on itself, where the design of the process creates friction that the people doing the work absorb at personal cost. Cecava learned this at Purdue and then practiced it at Delphi, where he worked as a lean...