Mee

Randall Mee, interim CEO at St. Anthony Hospital, will have to order new business cards.

The hospital’s board of trustees and Catholic Health Initiatives announced this week Mee will assume CEO duties permanently. He served as interim for four months following the sudden departure of his successor, Ted Fox in December.

Mee, a Montana native, once planned on becoming a physician, but wasn’t keen on the number of years he would have to invest in training. He enrolled in a nursing program instead and spent five years after graduation in a hospital environment. He later obtained his master’s in business administration and started down a hospital administration track.

Mee comes to St. Anthony from the Cottage Grove Community Hospital and South Lane Medical Group. Previously he served as an executive at health care facilities in Montana, including Providence Surgical Center in Missoula, Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls and Montana Deaconess Medical Center, also in Great Falls.

At St. Anthony, he said he is focused on recruiting physicians to Pendleton and constructing a new medical center within the next two years. The first is an especially-pressing need for the community, he said.

“There are approximately 7,000 people who don’t have a primary care physician,” Mee said. “My primary focus for the next couple of years is to replace primary care physicians who are considering retirement and those who have left the community.”

Mee said St. Anthony is enjoying success in its quest to attract doctors and nurse practitioners to Pendleton.

“Two family practice physicians will join us between June and November,” he said. “We are interviewing two other family practice physicians.”

An obstetrician will show up in June and a new pediatrician will arrive in September.

Orthopedic physician, Dr. Albelardo Sotelo, and a nurse practitioner, Ida Dunn, are already here.

Practitioners have four models to choose from, Mee said. They may set up independent practices, join existing offices, work as St. Anthony employees or become hospitalists, whose services are contracted from another organization.

Planning the new hospital campus will involve discussions with physicians and community members. What is learned from those sessions will meld with Catholic Health Initiative’s internal vision.

Mee called his leadership style “collaborative and participatory.”

“I want to work in a way that is going to develop a team,” he said.

Mee said he is enthusiastic about his new hospital.

“We have services that other hospitals of our size don’t have,” he said. “…We have one of the best radiologists in the Northwest (Dr. Cynthia Holmes) who has brought top technology.”

He listed the unit’s recently-upgraded MRI machine, a 64-slice computerized tomography (CT) scanner, digital mammography and nuclear medicine capabilities. He also lauded the hospital’s birthing center and the can-do attitude of the entire staff.

Randall and his wife Mercedes, a neonatal nurse, have two grown daughters.