When Barry Arbuckle asks fellow health system CEOs who their successor is, he is often surprised by the answer: There isn’t one.
But after 25 years leading Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare, Dr. Arbuckle is handing the CEO role to President David Kim, MD, on July 1 — a transition shaped by more than a decade of formal succession planning that he says is rare among his peers.
Dr. Arbuckle joined MemorialCare in 1989 and has served as CEO since 2002. He will become executive chairman of the health system July 1. The system has conducted thorough succession planning for at least the past 12 years, he told Becker’s.
The process spans the entire system — vice president and above, as well as the “single-threaded” roles below the vice president level that only one person holds. It is led by human resources team members and the board of directors’ compensation committee and focuses on two scenarios: What happens the next day if an executive cannot come into work — whether due to an accident or a health event — and more traditional succession planning, with two or three people being developed to follow a particular leader should they retire or move on.
“We’ve been doing it for at least 12 years in a very formal way, but in the last few years, we’ve really focused on the development plans of those high potential people who might succeed one of our key leaders, and what are the skills they need to allow them to hit the ground running?” Dr. Arbuckle said.
That process led Dr. Kim, a family medicine physician with clinical leadership experience, to the corner office. He was appointed president in early 2025 after serving as CEO of the MemorialCare Medical Foundation.
Dr. Arbuckle wanted the transition to be as seamless as possible, which they found in Dr. Kim.
“He’s not only practiced medicine in this market, he’s also worked for a competitor, which I think has a certain benefit, because he’s seen how other health systems in this market operate, and then he came back here, and everybody knew him,” Dr. Arbuckle said. “That’s a benefit, because it helps make sure that culture and the strategies that we think are important and the vision for the organization, organization continues, and I think we’re going to see what David is going to accelerate.”
As MemorialCare’s next CEO, one of Dr. Kim’s top priorities is to build a culture rallying around three pillars he has shared with the system over the past year as president: that MemorialCare is, first and foremost, a patient-centered, quality-driven organization; that it makes deliberate choices to create a loving culture; and that it engages in true partnership with nurses, physicians and community leaders to solve problems together.
“We need to continue to focus on operational excellence. And I think if we can pursue and achieve that operational excellence we are shooting for, and we can be faithful to those cultural pillars, I think our financial performance then is a result of that,” Dr. Kim said. “We all know how challenging healthcare is today in terms of margin, but I don’t want it to be an organization that leads with margin and then follows up with being patient centered and having cultural aspirations.”
Dr. Kim brings a less traditional perspective to the CEO role as a physician — one he said earns a level of trust from other physicians that non-physician leaders often have to work longer to build. He also learned the business of healthcare in a particular order: clinical first, then operational, then financial.
“I learned first about how to be clinically excellent. Then I became a medical director, and I learned how that takes certain operational excellence. And I became an executive, and I thought, ‘We need to make money to do all of this,'” Dr. Kim said. “It was in that sequence I learned it, so I think about it that way. It informs my approach to how we prioritize, how we communicate and the things that we will escalate. That feels very clarifying and acts as a true north for me.”
Dr. Kim is also focused on MemorialCare’s strategic growth plan, centered on two engines: clinical institutes and population health.
“The clinical Institute engine is thinking about high-end, largely procedural care that the community needs to be done in world class, best-in-class hospitals,” he said. “How do we convince patients that we are the health system of choice to come and receive that service and that care?”
The population health engine focuses on caring for patients across the full arc of their lives — not just when they show up at the hospital. Think of the patient who has not seen a physician in years, is nervous from a past negative experience, and has uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes. Without intervention, that patient ends up admitted in the hospital, he said.
For years, Dr. Kim said, health systems have framed volume and value as a trade-off: “We want to do more stuff, and then we want to create value, to focus on outcomes, and we’re straddling a foot in two canoes.
“I think that’s a false analogy. A healthy clinical Institute model and a healthy population health model are synergistic, and they can feed each other and help each other grow and help provide better care for the community. If you do one great and the other great, they really can be multipliers to each other. We’re going to double down on that thesis.”
For Dr. Arbuckle, the next chapter as executive chairman and co-chair of MemorialCare’s governing board centers on advocacy. He plans to continue his work on healthcare delivery and funding reform in California and nationally, including his role on the advisory committee to the board of California’s Office of Health Care Affordability, which was created three years ago to contain healthcare cost growth in the state. He also plans to focus on federal efforts to move the country faster toward value-based, proactive care — including Medicare Advantage, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, site-neutral payment policy and the role of pharmacy benefit managers.
He said one shift the industry needs is a collective acknowledgment that no single sector is the problem.
“We love to point fingers — providers about health plans, health plans about PBMs. I mean, it’s going every which way,” Dr. Arbuckle said. “We all share responsibility for this overly expensive, rather cumbersome, siloed system that we have in place, and it’s doing nothing but costing the federal government and our citizens way much more money than it should. That’s one of the things I’m hopeful we can make some progress in over the next few years.”
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