Finger Lakes Health System president and CEO James Dooley plans to exit his post in March, health system officials said Tuesday. The board has named FLHS chief medical officer Jose Acevedo M.D. to succeed Dooley.
The state’s longest continuously serving hospital chief, Dooley was hired as president and CEO of Geneva General Hospital in 1978. Then 31 and in his second job as a hospital administrator, Dooley initially planned the Geneva position to be a temporary stop before landing a job in his native Boston.
“I thought I'd be here three, three and a half years and then work my way back east,” Dooley told the Rochester Business Journal in an interview earlier this year.
Rather than looking to move to a big-city hospital, however, Dooley found himself settling into the Ontario County community where he and his wife, Caryl, raised two children and Dooley took on the job of coaching the town’s high school hockey team.
As Geneva General CEO, Dooley helped built the hospital into a community-owned regional health care organization, overseeing mergers with Taylor Brown Memorial Hospital in Seneca County and Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital in Yates County. The 660-bed system now operates two hospitals, Geneva General and Soldiers and Sailors, and a skilled nursing facility in Seneca County.
“Ultimately, it is all of us living in the communities served by the health system, and our children for generations, who have benefited from (Dooley’s) leadership and service,” said FLHS board chairman Bryan vonHahmann in a statement.
Dooley laid out his retirement plans to the FLHS board in 2007, giving directors a long lead time to search for a replacement, said Tom Kime, a past president of the board and a member of its CEO search committee. As the system’s chief medical officer, Acevedo helped recruit much of the system’s 80-doctor team of staff physicians. As the system’s first physician CEO, he would be “uniquely qualified” to lead FLHS, Kine said.
(c) 2009 Rochester Business Journal. To obtain permission to reprint this article, call 585-546-8303 or e-mail service@rbj.net.
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