Eric Cecava | The Longer Road Into Healthcare

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 implementation specialist applying Toyota Production System methodology to manufacturing operations.

Honeywell extended that foundation into supply chain management. Managing plant operations for consumer products facilities meant understanding how the inputs to a production process, materials, labor, equipment, information, have to be coordinated for the output to be reliable. When one element of that coordination fails, everything downstream absorbs the consequence. That is as true in healthcare as it is in manufacturing.

What the manufacturing environment gave Cecava that is harder to develop in a purely healthcare context is an orientation toward process as the primary variable. When something is not working in a clinical environment, the instinct is often to look at the people: who made the error, who was not following protocol. The process engineer's instinct is to look at the system first. Both orientations are necessary. Having both is unusual.

The 2010 Transition Was Deliberate

Cecava moved into healthcare in 2010, joining Adena Health System in South Central Ohio as System Director of Business Intelligence and Process Excellence. The move was deliberate. Healthcare is an industry where operational performance is directly connected to patient outcomes, and the process improvement skills he had developed in manufacturing had clear application to an environment where inefficiency is not just expensive but potentially dangerous.

At Adena, he led Lean Six Sigma deployment across the organization. The methodology was the same one he had applied in manufacturing. The context was different in ways that mattered: the workflows were clinical rather than physical, the stakeholders included physicians with high degrees of professional autonomy, and the consequences of getting it wrong were measured in patient safety rather than product defects.

He progressed through regional operations and quality roles before becoming Chief Operating Officer, responsible for three hospitals and an integrated medical group serving 400,000 patients across 12 counties. That progression reflected both the scope of the work and the expanding accountability that came with demonstrating that process discipline could be applied at scale in a health system.

McLaren Port Huron Was the Next Scale

Cecava joined McLaren Port Huron in Michigan in 2018 as Chief Operating Officer, moving from a three-hospital system in Ohio to a health system that included an acute care hospital, a skilled nursing facility, and an integrated medical group serving 235,000 patients across three Michigan counties. The operational scope was different, but the operational approach was continuous.

He became President and CEO of McLaren Port Huron in 2020. The CEO role at a health system is not a departure from operations: it is operations plus the external accountability that comes with enterprise leadership. The board relationships, the community relationships, the payer relationships, and the regulatory environment all sit on top of the operational foundation. The foundation has to be solid.

The six years at McLaren Port Huron included physician recruitment and contracting, clinical program development, facilities expansion, EHR implementation, employee engagement, and quality outcomes. That is a broad operational portfolio. The thread connecting each of those areas is the same: process discipline applied consistently in a complex clinical environment.

Fort Gratiot, Michigan, as Home Base

Cecava has lived in Fort Gratiot, in St. Clair County, where McLaren Port Huron operates. His community engagement in the area includes involvement with the YMCA, youth sports, and local economic development organizations. That is not incidental to his approach to health system leadership. A CEO who lives in the community the system serves has a different relationship to the stakes of the work than one who commutes in from somewhere else.

Outside of professional commitments, Cecava spends time on the water, golfing, hiking, and reading. He is a father to his son Mason. The longer road into healthcare, through Purdue and Ohio State and Delphi and Honeywell, eventually led to a specific community in Michigan that is not just a work location. It is where he is from, now.
Location: Michigan, USA

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