Veteran Orange County healthcare executive Deborah Proctor’s imprint will be felt by her successor.
“The responsibility for the successor rests with the board and our sponsors [St. Joseph Health Ministry],” said Proctor, the longtime chief executive of Irvine-based St. Joseph Health. “I can’t say that I will be part of the final decision, but I’m part of the process all the way along in terms of input [into] who they’re looking for, the characteristics that are needed.”
Proctor will retire from her post at the end of 2015. The 63-year-old, a registered nurse by training, has spent 25 years with the hospital operator in two different stints.
St. Joseph Health owns St. Joseph Hospital-Orange, St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton and Mission Hospital, which has campuses in Mission Viejo and Laguna Beach.
“Through her unique talents and guided by the spirit of our founders … Deborah has been a true visionary who has shaped St. Joseph Health into a highly successful organization that delivers on its ministry of healing to thousands of lives each year and greatly improves the health of the communities we serve,” Bill Noce, St. Joseph Health’s board chair, said in a statement.
Proctor “truly has a compassionate heart combined with a brilliant mind,” Noce added.
She started with what was then St. Joseph Health System and left to take various jobs before coming back in December 2004 to replace longtime leader Richard Statuto, who departed to take over Maryland-based Bon Secours Health System.
The company was known as St. Joseph Health System and was based in Orange at the time.
It has since grown to $5 billion in annual revenue and more than 24,000 employees. St. Joseph Health also struck a partnership in 2012 with Newport Beach-based Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian to create the St. Joseph Hoag Health regional delivery network.
Proctor mentioned “three key big things that we wanted to hold ourselves accountable to” during her early days at St. Joseph Health.
Those were “sacred encounters,” a nod to St. Joseph Health’s Catholic culture; a goal that 100% of St. Joseph Health’s patients would have “perfect care;” and a vow that “each of our communities would be the healthiest communities.”
Early Reform
St. Joseph Health adapted its own vision of healthcare reform in 2006, some years before federal healthcare reform became a national sensation.
“We felt as an organization that is oriented towards the community … we could see that the healthcare system was broken, and we thought we ought to write a new vision,” Proctor said. “We wrote our vision of healthcare reform, and that was before the president ever had legislation.”
That vision was centered on a mission of being more than a hospital operator, she said.
St. Joseph Health changed “over the last several years” to become what Proctor called a “health and wellness partner” with actions such as the creation of St. Joseph Hoag Health.
“St. Joseph has always been about having a special orientation for and care for those who live at the margins—and Hoag had always been very responsive to community needs,” Proctor said, mentioning that as she and Dr. Richard Afable, then Hoag’s chief executive, talked, “we felt that could be done better if we came together.”
Afable is now chief executive of St. Joseph Hoag Health.
Proctor said she was also proud of “two other things” she accomplished during her St. Joseph Health tenure.
One is the Innovation Institute LLC, a La Palma-based for-profit healthcare company of which St. Joseph Health is a founding member.
The institute, which is separate from the health system, is designed to advance innovation in healthcare through developing products and services grown out of doctors’ and employees’ inventions and ideas.
Proctor also said she was pleased with St. Joseph Health’s 2013 investment in Boulder, Colo.-based Datu Health.
Datu develops software to connect clinical records, personalized healthcare data and consumers’ health-related preferences.
