Venture-backed Cogent Healthcare Inc. has a new chief executive.
Eugene Fleming, a former executive at publicly traded healthcare companies, has been named to head the Irvine-based provider of specialty doctors.
William Hamburg, who was serving as interim chief executive, is set to remain with Cogent as a board member.
Hamburg became the temporary leader of the company after Alan Puzarne resigned last year for undisclosed reasons. Puzarne was Cogent’s chief for three years.
Cogent, which provides doctors who exclusively work in hospitals, or hospitalists, has raised some $35 million in venture funding. The company’s investors include Versant Ventures, which has an office in Newport Beach.
Cogent is looking to grow under Fleming, who also was named president of the company.
“We have to think nationally,” Fleming said.
Cogent, which mainly operates in the South and East, is considering several growth strategies.
“We’d like to have a meaningful company, whether that be continue to grow it as a private company for the next couple of years or look at strategies that allow us to grow even more rapidly, like going public,we’d certainly consider that,” he said.
Fleming takes over 11-year-old Cogent after most recently running Nashville, Tenn.-based Surgical Alliance Corp., a venture-backed developer of outpatient surgery centers and surgical hospitals.
Fleming said Cogent’s competition comes mainly from locally run, “mom and pop” hospitalist programs started by individual hospitals. One larger rival is North Hollywood-based IPC,The Hospitalist Co., which also is privately held and venture-backed.
Cogent has 233 workers, including 37 in Irvine.
Fleming is familiar with hospitalist programs.
“I was a hospital CEO many years ago and actually started one of the first hospitalist programs in the country almost by accident,” said Fleming, who will split his time between Irvine and Nashville, where Cogent has a satellite office.
Fleming’s hospital was in Gainesville, Fla. Fleming held chief executive titles at several hospitals owned by Columbia Healthcare Corp., which now is known as HCA Inc.
He also was chief operating officer of Quorum Health Group, an operator of hospitals that was bought by Dallas-based Triad Hospitals in 2001.
Cogent and other hospitalist providers have faced some challenges, particularly in the practice’s early days in the 1990s.
Some primary care doctors have charged that hospitalists come between them and their patients, reducing the quality of care, and HMOs’ attempts to make such programs mandatory were beaten back by organized medicine opposition.
Breaking down other doctors’ resistance is “like anything you do. It takes education, it takes proven examples,” Fleming said.
