Maureen Zehntner never expected to be where she is now,running UCI Medical Center, Orange County’s largest hospital.
After serving as interim chief executive since early 2006, Zehntner said she didn’t apply for the job permanently. Instead, she was prevailed upon to throw her hat in after a national search.
Zehntner, who had been the Orange hospital’s chief operating officer since 1996, got the permanent chief executive job in March.
She was one of five executives and entrepreneurs honored at the Business Journal’s 14th annual Women in Business award lunch May 22 in Irvine.
That was also something Zehntner didn’t expect.
“OK, I’m Irish and emotional, so we were just toasting to the losers,” Zehntner said, thinking she was among them.
Zehntner has a big project on her plate,opening UCI Medical Center’s $635 million hospital expansion in early 2009. The new hospital, the biggest in a wave of expansions around the county, is set to replace UCI Medical Center’s current tower, which dates back to the 1960s and doesn’t meet Califor-nia’s earthquake standards.
“It’s been a huge focus,” Zehntner said of the expansion.
The project, which is adding 482,428 square feet of space, 236 beds and 15 operating rooms, is “absolutely on budget” and three months ahead of schedule, according to Zehntner.
She credits that to what she called “a disciplined process” for construction and design.
“We’re sticking to the course,if we want to make changes afterward, we’ll make them as a separate project,” Zehntner said. “We are not going out of budget on this.”
Zehntner is effusive about the opening of the expanded hospital, which is run as a teaching facility for the University of California, Irvine.
“Part of the fun for me is to be able to open up this hospital and give,not just to the community, but to our faculty and staff,a really nice place to work (with) private rooms, huge spaces,” she said.
Zehntner was tapped for the hospital’s top job for her “broad understanding of running the technical aspects of a hospital,” UC Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake said.
She also has strong skills to interact with faculty, staff and patients and holds “patient care as our highest and primary responsibility,” Drake said.
Zehntner took over the hospital after longtime boss Ralph Cygan stepped down under pressure in the wake of a liver transplant program scandal. Cygan remains on the School of Medicine’s faculty.
Past Issues
UCI received some flack for picking Zehntner, a longtime administrator, at a time when the school is moving past a period of scandals.
Besides the liver transplant issue, UCI has seen problems with its willed body program, including the sale of cadavers, and the discovery that a professor misspent as much as $2.3 million on software instead of cancer research.
And in 1995, before Zehntner’s arrival, fertility doctors at the university’s Center for Reproductive Medicine took eggs and embryos without patient consent and implanted them into other women.
That scandal, Zehntner said, “was on the front page when they were recruiting me.”
“I thought ‘Why the hell would I want to go over there?'” she said.
Former UCI Medical center boss Mark Laret, who recruited Zehntner, told her the issue “was a couple of rogue doctors who created all this havoc for otherwise a really good organization,” she said.
David Bailey, UCI’s vice chancellor for health affairs and Zehntner’s direct boss, dismissed any concerns about Zehntner being chief operating officer during some of the hospital’s past issues.
“In her case, sure, she was here during that time, but there were hundreds, probably thousands of people here during that time who had nothing to do with this,” Bailey said. “What am I going to do,fire everybody? That’s silly.”
As part of a strategy to try and prevent problems, Zehntner put together a “CEO cabinet” that meets regularly and includes faculty leaders.
The hospital hasn’t lost community support, Zehntner said, citing a recent survey of more than 800 patients in which “nobody talked about it.”
Her road to the chief executive’s office wasn’t a traditional one. Although she has more than 30 years of experience in hospitals dating back to her nursing days, she’s not a doctor and doesn’t have a master’s in business administration.
That didn’t faze Bailey, a physician.
“She was the candidate who most espoused patient care, which is what we’re all about,” he said.
Earlier Career
Zehntner’s pre-UCI career includes spending 16 years with defunct Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim, working her way up from a part-time nursing assistant while she was in school to executive vice president and chief operating officer.
She left Martin Luther in 1990. Zehntner was slated to become the hospital’s chief executive and was supported by doctors and its board, “But I truly hit a glass ceiling because the person who was in charge of the system we belonged to (Unihealth America) didn’t see women in those positions.”
She then moved to St. Joseph Health System’s hospital in Orange, serving as chief operating officer for nearly four years before leaving the nonprofit Catholic hospital operator.
“It wasn’t a fit for me,” she said.
Zehntner, who has a son and a daughter, also served as an operating consultant for Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
