Dr. Ralph de la Torre is the Chairman and CEO of Steward Health Care Systems LLC. Steward Health Care is the largest physician-owned hospital system in the United States, with 39 hospitals and more than 5,500 providers caring for 12.3 million patients a year. The system is the nation’s largest accountable care organization (ACO), whose performance is top ranked in quality and patient experience. Steward accrues $6.5 billion in revenue annually.
Prior to founding Steward, Dr. de la Torre was CEO of Caritas Christi Health Care, where he led the transformation of a six-hospital system and developed the business model for Steward, which was subsequently invested in by Cerberus Capital Management.
Previously, Dr. de la Torre was founder and CEO of the Cardiovascular Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and of Cardiovascular Management Associates, one of the nation's first totally integrated systems for treating cardiac patients. At the same time, Dr. de la Torre was Chief of Cardiac Surgery at BIDMC and a Harvard Medical Faculty Physician at BIDMC ‒ he was widely recognized as one of the top cardiac surgeons in the nation.
He has founded several health care-related businesses and has numerous issued or pending patents. A frequent commentator on national health care policy issues, Dr. de la Torre has bylined and/or been featured in Businessweek, Fortune, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox Business, among other outlets. He was recently voted one of the 25 most powerful physician executives in the United States by Modern Healthcare magazine. Dr. de la Torre graduated from Duke University in 1988 (B.S.E.), where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi, and from a joint program between Harvard Medical School (M.D.) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.S.) in 1992.
