California Health Care Personnel Update for March 2008
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has appointed Cathryn Nation (D) of Kensington to the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission.
Nation is the associate vice president for health sciences of the University of California Office of the President, where she has worked in various positions since 1990. The position does not require Senate confirmation, and Nation will not receive a salary (Office of the Governor release, 3/14).
John Rampulla, head of the emergency department at Doctors Medical Center in San Pablo, was expected to step down March 1 to take a position as ED director for Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco.
Rampulla's replacement is Desmond Carson, who also sits on the West Contra Costa Healthcare District board and the Doctors Medical Center Management Authority's Joint Powers Authority (Hogarth, East Bay Business Times, 3/3).
Harry VanDyck has been named president of the board of directors of the Free Clinic of Simi Valley, a not-for-profit organization that provides no-cost medical, dental, legal and other services to individuals who cannot afford them.
VanDyck's term will last throughout 2008. He is the owner of Century Accounting and Tax Solutions (Ventura County Star, 3/25).
Jamie Robinson on July 1 will step down as editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, a health policy journal, and return to his position as the Kaiser Permanente Distinguished Professorship of Health Economics in the UC-Berkeley School of Public Health, the San Francisco Business Times reports.
Robinson will continue to work as a contributing editor to the journal (Rauber/Hogarth, San Francisco Business Times, 3/10).
Health Evolution Partners, a health care private equity firm funded largely by CalPERS, has appointed Jeffrey Rideout as its chief medical officer. Rideout is a former executive with Cisco Systems and Blue Shield of California.
Health Evolution Partners also named two principal advisers:
- John Rowe, former chair and CEO of Aetna; and
- Peter Lee, executive director of national health policy and former CEO for the Pacific Business Group on Health (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 3/4).
Local Health Plans of California, a not-for-profit managed care association that advocates for eight health plans, has named John Ramey as its executive director.
Ramey until recently was a senior health policy consultant for the Office of Governor. He previously served as founding executive director of the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board and deputy secretary for the Health and Welfare Agency (Local Health Plans of California release, 3/18).
Scripps Research Institute has created a Center for Regenerative Medicine and hired stem cell scientist Jeanne Loring to lead it.
Loring has been on the Burnham Institute's faculty since 2004 and will retain an adjunct faculty position there (Somers, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3/26).
Darwin Remboldt, president and CEO of Simi Valley Hospital from 1984 to 1989, has been reappointed as its CEO. Remboldt left his post as vice president of Clinic Services for Adventist Health to take the position.
The hospital also named John Beaman, CFO of Littleton Adventist Hospital, as its CFO (Ventura County Star, 3/15).
UC-Irvine Medical Center has named Maureen Zehntner as its CEO. Zehntner has served as interim CEO since 2005.
Zehntner is a registered nurse and will oversee the completion of the university's new $635 million hospital, which is expected to open in 2009 (Barboza, Los Angeles Times, 3/20).
The University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine has named Michael Hindery as vice dean for administration, finance and clinical programs.
Hindery, former senior associate dean for finance and administration at the Stanford School of Medicine, will be responsible for a nearly $1 billion operating budget (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 3/5).
Barry Zimmerman, Ventura County personnel chief, will replace Ted Myers as head of the county's Human Services Agency, which oversees food stamps, child abuse and neglect investigations, and various other initiatives.
Myers resigned in March after five years as director of the agency (Wilson, Ventura County Star, 3/12).
Schwarzenegger has appointed Ronald Joseph of Sacramento to the California Health Facilities Financing Authority. Joseph, who operates a government consulting firm, has held leadership positions at the Department of General Services, Medical Board of California and Department of Health Services.
The position does not require Senate confirmation and does not include a salary. Joseph declined to state a political affiliation (Office of the Governor release, 3/17).
Schwarzenegger has appointed Joe Corless (R) of Corona to the California Health Policy and Data Advisory Commission. The position does not offer compensation or require Senate confirmation.
Corless is a physician and chief of the allergy section for the Department of Pediatrics at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in San Bernardino County. He is also an associate professor at Western University of Health Sciences and the UC-Irvine School of Medicine (Office of the Governor release, 3/14).
California's stem cell institute has named Marie Csete, head of Emory University's core stem cell facility, as its chief scientific officer.
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine will pay Csete $310,000 annually for the position, which she took over on April 1 (Somers, San Diego Union-Tribune, 3/13).
Gov. Schwarzenegger has appointed Lupe Alonzo-Diaz (D) of Elk Grove as the executive officer of the Health Professions Education Foundation for the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
Alonzo-Diaz is the former executive director for the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California. The position does not require Senate confirmation and offers an annual salary of $108,000 (Office of the Governor release, 3/14).
The California Transplant Donor Network has named Cynthia Siljestrom, current CEO of East Bay Integrated Care and executive vice president of the Hospice Foundation of the East Bay in Pleasant Hill, as its new CEO.
Siljestrom will assume her new role on April 14 and replace Phyllis Weber, a founder of the organization (East Bay Business Times, 3/12).
Catholic Healthcare West on March 24 named Robert Wiebe as chief medical officer and a senior vice president for the hospital chain.
Wiebe will replace George Bo-Linn, who has become the chief program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Wiebe will lead all clinical and patient care initiatives in CHW's 41 hospitals in California, Arizona and Nevada (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 3/24).
Norm Kramer, interim executive director of Coalinga State Hospital, stepped down on March 28 after less than a year in the position. Kramer came out of retirement to take the position at the mental hospital, but labor rules prohibit him from working more than 960 hours as a retired annuitant.
Department of Mental Health spokesperson Nancy Kincaid said the agency is in the process of a national search for a new director (Lin, Sacramento Bee, 3/25).
Tenet Healthcare has named Karolee Sowle as CEO of Desert Regional Medical Center.
Sowle has been the center's interim CEO since November 2006 and was the company's COO for four years prior to that position (Los Angeles Business, 3/26).