Eric Cecava
Healthcare executive. Operations leader. Writing about what it takes to run something well.
Practical thinking on healthcare operations, leadership, and the work behind the results.
Most of what gets written about healthcare leadership is abstract. Strategy decks and frameworks that describe the destination without explaining the road. This site is an attempt to do something different: write honestly about how operational decisions get made, what makes organizations work, and what Eric Cecava has learned running a hospital, a skilled nursing facility, and a medical group at the same time.
Eric Cecava spent his career in operations before he was ever in a corner office. That background shapes how he thinks about every problem: find the constraint, understand the system, fix what’s actually broken. These posts are where he works through that thinking in public.
About Eric Cecava
Eric Cecava is a healthcare executive and former President and CEO of McLaren Port Huron, where he led a hospital, a skilled nursing facility, and an integrated medical group serving three counties in Michigan. Before coming to McLaren Port Huron, he spent eight years at Adena Health System in Ohio, rising to Chief Operating Officer. His earlier career was in Lean production and process improvement in manufacturing.
Recent Posts
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Eric Cecava | What It Means to Run Something Well
This is the question Eric Cecava has spent his career trying to answer. He’s still working on it. The Operational Definition Running something well means that the people the organization is supposed to serve are getting what they’re supposed to get, reliably, and that the people doing the work can sustain it. That definition is…
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Eric Cecava | The Gap Between What Physicians Want and What Organizations Need
This tension is structural. Understanding it is the first step to working with it. The Nature of the Gap There is a structural gap in most health systems between what physicians want from the organization and what the organization can provide. The gap isn’t primarily about money, though money is part of it. It’s about…
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Eric Cecava | Why Simple Solutions Are Harder to Build Than Complex Ones
Organizations default to complexity. Simplicity requires more work, not less. The Bias Toward Complexity Adding a step to a process is almost always easier than removing one. Adding a committee is easier than dissolving one. Adding a metric to a dashboard is easier than deciding which existing metric to retire. Organizations accumulate complexity the way…