About Eric Cecava
Former President and CEO, McLaren Port Huron. Operations-first healthcare executive. Fort Gratiot, Michigan.
Eric Cecava didn’t start in healthcare. He started on a manufacturing floor, learning how to see a production system the way an engineer sees it: inputs, outputs, constraints, and the gaps where things go wrong. That experience turned out to be more useful than anything he could have picked up in a healthcare administration program, because the problems are the same. The materials are different.
His path into healthcare came through operations. He took a role at Adena Health System in Ohio, where he ran business intelligence and operational improvement across three hospitals and 12 counties. The work was about getting data to drive decisions, then building the processes that made those decisions stick. He spent years there learning how regional health systems work under resource constraints: what you can control, what you can’t, and how to tell the difference.
He came to McLaren Port Huron as Chief Operating Officer. Two years later, he was named President and CEO. That transition from COO to CEO is one he writes about often on this site, because it requires a different kind of thinking than most people expect. The COO’s job is to run what exists. The CEO’s job is to decide what should exist. The skills transfer, but the frame doesn’t.
As President and CEO at McLaren Port Huron, Eric Cecava was responsible for a hospital, a skilled nursing facility, and an integrated medical group serving three counties in Michigan’s Thumb region. The work involved everything from capital planning and physician recruitment to regulatory compliance and labor relations. But the core operational challenge never changed: get three different entities, with three different cultures and three different sets of incentives, to function as one system.
He came to healthcare from Delphi, the automotive components manufacturer, where he worked in Lean production and process improvement. The Toyota Production System isn’t primarily about efficiency. It’s about where defects come from and how to stop them before they compound. Applying that lens to healthcare delivery took time, but the underlying logic transferred cleanly.
This site is where Eric Cecava writes about what he’s learned. It’s not a portfolio and it’s not a resume. It’s an attempt to think clearly, in public, about what makes organizations work and what makes them fail. If you’re a healthcare executive, an administrator, or someone working through the same kinds of problems he’s spent his career on, he hopes some of it is useful.
Career
President and CEO | McLaren Port Huron | Port Huron, Michigan
Chief Operating Officer | McLaren Port Huron | Port Huron, Michigan
Director, Business Intelligence and Operational Improvement | Adena Health System | Chillicothe, Ohio
Operations and Process Improvement | Delphi Corporation
Education
Eric Cecava holds a Master of Business Administration. His undergraduate work was in business.