President and CEO of Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. Forty years into a healthcare career that started with a different plan, and a 1960s Corvette in the garage that started with a different owner.
On any given Tuesday morning, Kevin Klockenga is walking the floors of Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital - 357 beds, Level II trauma, the only hospital in the Santa Clarita Valley. He has been doing the corner-office walk for a long time. Ten years of it ran Providence's entire Northern California region: six acute care hospitals, three trauma centers, five ambulatory surgery centers, four urgent care centers. He retired from that post in May 2021. Sat with it. Then took the Henry Mayo chair on March 13, 2023, replacing Roger Seaver, who had held it for twenty-two years.
The pitch he gave the board was not about himself. He has been repeating one line, in different rooms, since the day he arrived: "It's about us, and what we want the next chapter of Henry Mayo to be." It is a CEO line and a community line at once, and that is the point. Klockenga is interested in the chapter, not the byline.
What he inherited is a not-for-profit community hospital with 2,100 employees, an Advanced Primary Stroke Center designation, a Level II trauma verification, and a long list of service lines that read like a small regional health system: cancer care, NICU, behavioral health, cardiovascular services, joint replacement and spine surgery, a wound care center, a breast center. The hospital sits at 23845 McBean Parkway. Annual revenue runs above three billion dollars. The 661-200-2000 main line rings into a switchboard that's been busy for forty years.
What Klockenga brings to it is the central Illinois cadence of a town of seventeen thousand. He grew up in Lincoln, Illinois, the oldest of two boys. His grandfather farmed. His grandfather also reportedly decided which of his four sons would farm and which would do something else. Klockenga's father landed on the "something else" side and opened a car dealership at age nineteen. That is the family memory the CEO has carried into his sixties: pick a thing, open it, run it.
It's certainly the friendliest place I've ever met. The joke part of that is that Walt Disney better look out. Walt Disney claims they're the friendliest place on earth. And I think he has some competition with Santa Clarita here. - Klockenga, on his first weeks in town
Numbers reflect Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital and Klockenga's prior tenure.
The undergraduate version of Klockenga was on the pre-med track at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. He had a stethoscope future drawn out for himself. Then an uncle who worked in hospital administration sat him down. The conversation pulled him sideways. Not out of medicine - just out of practicing it.
He took the long view from there. Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis runs one of the most quietly respected health administration programs in the country. He got his master's there. The MHA is the executive's equivalent of the medical degree: the degree that means you understand the system the doctors work inside of.
The next twenty-five years are a string of operations roles ending in the Northern California hospital market, where he joined St. Joseph Health in 2008 as Sonoma County's chief operating officer. Within a year he was CEO of the two-hospital Sonoma County system. Within three more years he was running the entire Northern California region.
When St. Joseph Health merged with Providence in 2016, the regional CEO title stuck. The footprint kept growing. Acquisitions. New service lines. Quality metrics tracked like a stock price. He held the seat until 2021, then stepped away. The Henry Mayo board called eighteen months later. He took the offer.
Klockenga is on record about one thing more than any other: culture that outlasts him. He talks about it in interviews. He talks about it in podcasts. He talks about it in board rooms. The word he keeps returning to is "collective." He wants the staff, the physicians, and the board pulling the same direction, and he wants whatever they build to be still standing the day after he stops signing memos.
This is, technically, the boring answer to a journalist's question. It is also the only answer that matters at a community hospital in 2026. Henry Mayo serves about 300,000 people in the Santa Clarita Valley. There is no second hospital in town. If Henry Mayo gets its culture wrong, the valley feels it on a Tuesday morning. If Henry Mayo gets it right, nobody notices, which is the highest praise a hospital can earn.
The other thing he keeps repeating is "impact." He says he is at the point in his career where he is looking to make an impact on the hospital - not on his resume. He has had the big regional title. He has had the ten-hospital span of control. The Henry Mayo job is smaller in scope and, by his own framing, larger in meaning.
The April 2025 appointment to the Hospital Association of Southern California board adds a regional megaphone to the job. HASC represents hospitals across Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. The seat gives Henry Mayo a voice on the policy questions the whole region argues about - workforce, reimbursement, emergency department capacity, the slow rebuild after the pandemic. It is the kind of board seat a CEO accepts because the work matters, not because the meetings are short.
He treats routine exercise as part of the executive job. The logic is unsentimental: a hospital CEO who lets his own engine seize up has lost an argument before he has made it.
The doubles partner is also the spouse. Both sports favor patience over power. Both reward the player who shows up early and stays calm under pressure.
A 1960s model he is restoring on weekends. He has nothing to prove and a wrench in his hand. It is the cleanest possible counterweight to a job spent inside fluorescent meetings.
He says it without irony. The German work ethic of the central Illinois grandparents is the family inheritance he kept, along with the last name.
His public answer to almost every question is some version of "the team." This is partly humility and partly a tell: he runs the hospital like a relay, not a sprint.
The line about leaving "a culture that outlives my tenure" is not a quotable flourish. It is the org chart he is actually drawing.
CEO and system EVP across six acute care hospitals, three trauma centers, five ambulatory surgery centers, four urgent care centers. He oversaw acquisitions, new service lines and quality initiatives across the footprint.
Taking the seat after Roger Seaver was a public assignment. He started March 13, 2023. The cultural runway he is building is the deliverable.
Joined the Board of Directors of the Hospital Association of Southern California, the policy voice for the region's hospitals.
"It's about us, and what we want the next chapter of Henry Mayo to be."
"I want Henry Mayo to be the best place for patients to receive care."
"At this point in my career, I'm looking to make an impact on the hospital."
If the culture sticks, nobody will notice. That is the highest praise a hospital can earn. And the only one Klockenga seems to be chasing.