River Region names CEO to take over next month

Published 12:00 am Friday, June 29, 2001

[06/29/01] Phillip Clendenin has been named chief executive officer of River Region Health System as the dominant health-care provider here prepares to move into new facilities.

The local corporation is now a subsidiary of Dallas-based Triad Inc., but Clendenin has a background with Nashville-based Hospital Corporation of America.

He will come from Greenview Regional Hospital in Bowling Green, Ky., where he has been CEO since 1997, and will replace Alan Daugherty who resigned citing personal reasons.

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Clendenin officially takes over July 25. Daugherty was named CEO in 1998 and was chief financial officer here before that.

One of Clendenin’s priorities, he said, will be to oversee completion of the $112 million River Region Medical Center located at 2100 U.S. 61 North. Construction remains ahead of schedule, and the building is expected to be occupied in February.

“I have toured the new state-of-the-art facility and believe it will be one of the premier facilities in the country,” Clendenin said in a press release.

The new facility, in Warren County outside Vicksburg, will replace the two hospitals that have served the area for decades. ParkView Regional Medical Center on Grove at McAuley was built in the 1950s and will no longer be used. Vicksburg Medical Center on North Frontage Road was built in the 1970s and is to be used for specialized care.

Clendenin began his career as an administrator with BJC Health System in St. Louis, Mo., the region’s largest hospital system, and later joined Tenet Health Care Corp. in Tennessee and Louisiana. He has held other executive positions with Hospital Corporation of America in Dallas and Houston.

He holds a master’s degree in hospital administration from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in business and finance from the University of Tennessee.

He will be joined by his wife, Misty, and his two children, Tom and Lucy.

Clendenin is the third CEO of River Region since Quorum, River Region’s former parent company, achieved a series of mergers and acquisitions to bring virtually all hospitals and clinics in the Vicksburg area under unified ownership.

Quorum, based in Nashville, acquired the former Mercy Regional Medical Center and changed its name to ParkView Regional Medical Center in 1990. The Street Clinic and Family Medical Clinic merged with ParkView in 1994, forming River Region Medical Center. Three years later, the physician-owners of the Vicksburg Clinic merged with River Region. The company took over the Vicksburg Medical Center in 1998.

In October of last year, Triad Hospitals, Inc., a Dallas-based company, bought out Quorum.