Alice Issai knows health care.
The veteran hospital administrator has been leading the 515-bed Adventist Health Glendale hospital since 2018 and is the first woman to lead the medical center. Before that, her career included stops at medical centers like City of Hope in Duarte and care provider networks such as Keck Medicine of USC.
Last year, she saw her territory expand and was named president of a new service area, integrating the 136-bed Simi Valley Hospital with Adventist Health’s larger medical center in Glendale.
Issai sat down with the Business Journal to discuss her new role and the future of both hospitals.
What first got you interested in health care?
It just landed on my lap. I was graduating with my undergrad degree in business and finance in Michigan, and I was moving to California and to Glendale actually, and I got a job offer to be a financial analyst at this hospital….and I fell in love with the work that was in front of me.
After stints at other organizations, you came back to Adventist Health Glendale and recently added Adventist Health Simi Valley to your service area. Why?
I was asked to lead Simi Valley… to bring our hospitals closer to each other and take advantage of each other’s strengths and be able to help more patients as we become a more aligned network of hospitals.
In taking over the hospital, what have been some of the biggest challenges or surprises you have faced?
One of the things that has really surprised me is how tight the community is, how passionate they are for their hospital in Simi. The employees, the physicians, the community, they’re very, very passionate about what that hospital is, what it is offering them, and I just want to make sure that we preserve those nice relationships and we continue developing and growing the hospital. The passion for that community is pretty phenomenal.
Before you took over, the Simi Valley hospital closed its maternity services and neonatal care units. What was the thought process and are there any plans to reopen those units?
A lot of smaller labor and delivery programs are closing or have closed in the past couple of years in the country. In our own backyard, Verdugo Hills Hospital (in Glendale), part of Keck Medicine, closed its maternity unit in November of 2024. As birth rates are declining, smaller units, smaller programs are becoming very challenged, because it’s 24/7 coverage, and it has become really financially challenging if you don’t have the volume…
I don’t think there are any plans to reopen. But one thing I’m really excited about is we have re-engaged the same physicians from their GYN and (women’s health) program, and we want to boost that program and make sure that women’s services are really covered outside of labor and delivery.
I’m very, very excited about reigniting the women’s program at Simi and incorporating a breast (health) program in addition to the GYN program.
Adventist Health Glendale, meanwhile, has been taking in more expectant mothers. How has that impacted the hospital?
It’s going really well. The more births we bring into Glendale (makes) our hospital stronger. Our number of births has really increased because we’ve recruited many, many physicians from the community to come and bring their patients to give birth here.
Can you tell me about the additional operating rooms planned for Glendale?
We’re very excited. We have eight operating rooms today in the hospital, and we have space to build four additional, so a total of 12. We’re a large hospital and that is already in progress, and our target date is sometime between the third and fourth quarter of 2026, next year, to have those rooms in operation.
And we are growing our surgical sub-specialties. We have recruited many surgical sub-specialists in our market, in our hospitals, and we’re a very comprehensive center for many services.
Since taking over the Simi Valley hospital, you have been working to improve its finances. How has that been going?
Many hospitals are challenged financially, so we have put a lot of measures and controls in place to really, truly focus on things that as a community hospital we should be focused on, and that is the work we’ve done in the past several months.
Currently, we are focused on growth. (There are) a lot of opportunities for growing the service lines in different disciplines, (we’re) putting a lot of energy behind that, we’ve been really successful in attracting new physicians, and also being able to launch new programs to improve the growth of the hospital.
How are you using robotics at the hospitals
you oversee?
We have a pretty advanced robotics center, especially at Simi Valley….We both have all the robots that today exist in hospitals. The new surgeons that we recruit, they’re all now robotically trained, and the first thing they look for is how advanced the medical center is at robotic surgery…It is a growing field, and I think every hospital is starting to invest in that.
What’s next for both of the hospitals you oversee?
We have really a robust strategic plan…Our most immediate growth plans are underway and already producing results, (such as) getting into the interventional world. We’ve done really well in the Structural Heart Care program. We’re continuing to build our interventional GI program …
Also, we’re really advancing ourselves in interventional radiology services, so we’re getting into, in addition to what we’ve done really well in the past several years, getting into the intervention world, which really helps patients to get care in a minimally invasive way. It extends their life. They’re able to go home very quickly and get back to their normal life without a major surgery.
