Healthcare Executive Eric Cecava: Physician Recruitment Is Not a Relationship Strategy, and Health Systems That Treat It as One Pay for It Later

• The former McLaren Port Huron CEO argues that confusing the mechanics of hiring physicians with the work of physician engagement is a structural error that community health systems repeat at significant cost.

FORT GRATIOT, Mich., Jul 30, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — Regional health systems in the United States face a persistent challenge in maintaining the physician relationships that connect their hospitals and medical groups to the communities they serve. The standard response to gaps in physician coverage is a recruitment effort: identify the specialty needed, find a candidate, make an offer, complete the credentialing process, and move on. Eric Cecava, who managed physician recruitment and contracting at McLaren Port Huron in Michigan across an integrated medical group serving three counties, argues that this response addresses only the visible portion of the problem.

Physician recruitment is a logistics function. It fills positions, moves candidates through a process, and produces a credentialed physician who is ready to begin seeing patients. What it does not produce, by itself, is a physician who is integrated into the health system, aligned with its clinical priorities, or committed to the community it serves. The distinction between having a physician on staff and having a physician who is genuinely part of the organization is the distinction between recruitment and physician relations, and most health systems conflate the two.

“The contract does not build the relationship,” Cecava said. “The relationship builds the contract.”

The work of physician relations, as Cecava describes it, begins after the recruitment process ends. Physicians who are new to a community need introductions to the referral networks, clinical colleagues, and community institutions that define the practice environment. They need clear lines of communication with hospital administration about clinical program direction, resource allocation, and operational decisions that affect their patients. They need to feel that the organization is as invested in their success as it asked them to be when it made the offer.

Most health systems do not budget for that work at the level they budget for recruitment. The search process, the signing bonus, the relocation assistance, and the recruitment advertising are visible costs that appear in a line item. The ongoing work of physician engagement, which requires administrative attention, communication infrastructure, and sustained organizational investment, is harder to quantify and easier to deprioritize when other priorities compete for the same management time and attention.

“Recruitment gets you to the credentialing stage,” Cecava said. “What happens after that is a different kind of work, and most health systems do not staff or budget for it the way they do for the search.”

Physicians who are poorly integrated into a health system’s culture and operations express that disconnection in predictable ways. They reduce their referral activity. They limit their engagement in clinical program development. They become less available for conversations about operational improvement. And at some point, some of them leave. In a regional health system serving a defined geographic market, physician attrition is not just a staffing problem. It is a capacity problem and a community health problem, and it is substantially more expensive to address than it would have been to prevent.

“Physicians who are poorly integrated leave,” Cecava said. “When they leave, the community they were serving does not just lose a provider. It loses continuity, and that loss takes a long time to recover from.”

Health systems that manage physician relations well treat it as a standing function rather than a periodic recruitment event. They assign administrative staff to physician relations with clear responsibility for the day-to-day communication and coordination that keeps physicians connected to the organization. They create formal structures for physician input on clinical and operational decisions. They treat the recruitment agreement not as a transaction completed but as the beginning of an ongoing relationship that requires sustained attention.

At McLaren Port Huron, Cecava was responsible for physician recruitment and contracting as part of a broader operational role that included managing the integrated medical group. That context made the distinction between recruitment and physician relations concrete. Recruiting a physician who then struggled to find referral sources or felt disconnected from the hospital’s clinical direction produced the same outcome as a failed recruitment: a physician who left, or who stayed but was not effectively integrated into the care the system was delivering.

The physician relations problem is structural in regional health systems because the competitive pressure to fill positions creates urgency around recruitment that does not exist around the slower, less visible work of engagement and retention. A vacancy in a needed specialty is visible and costly. A physician who is present but disengaged is harder to see and easier to ignore until the disengagement becomes departure. By that point, the recruitment process starts again, and the cycle repeats.

For community health systems competing for a limited supply of physicians willing to practice in regional markets, physician retention is as strategically important as physician recruitment. The cost of recruiting and replacing a physician who leaves is significantly higher than the cost of the administrative investment required to keep one engaged. Health systems that understand that relationship invest in physician relations as a function, not as an afterthought to the recruitment event.

Cecava holds a Certified Project Manager credential from Xavier University in addition to his MBA from The Ohio State University and his Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. A proud father to his son Mason, he is active in community service in St. Clair County through the YMCA and local economic development efforts. He has lived in Fort Gratiot, Michigan, and in Troy and Grove City, Ohio.

About Eric Cecava

Eric Cecava is a healthcare executive with a background in hospital operations, physician relations, and health system leadership. He served as President and CEO of McLaren Port Huron from 2020 to 2026, overseeing a hospital, skilled nursing facility, and integrated medical group serving 235,000 patients across three counties in Michigan. Before that, he served as Chief Operating Officer at McLaren Port Huron and at Adena Health System in South Central Ohio, where he directed operations across three hospitals serving 400,000 patients. His earlier career was in manufacturing and supply chain operations at Delphi Automotive and Honeywell International. Eric Cecava holds an MBA from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.