Dr. Samuel Osei

The story

Samuel was born in Kumasi, Ghana, and came to the United States at seventeen on a scholarship to study chemistry at Oregon State. He planned to return home as a chemist; a summer volunteering in an emergency room in Corvallis changed that plan permanently.

He trained in emergency medicine at OHSU and practiced for fifteen years before moving into hospital leadership. He has been president of Salem Regional Medical Center, a 400-bed hospital with 3,000 employees, since 2016, and still works two emergency shifts a month because, he says, 'a hospital president who doesn't see patients forgets what the building is for.'

He joined Meridian Trust's board in 2018 after the bank financed the hospital's new cardiac wing, and now chairs the audit committee. He brought to it the hospital's practice of 'morbidity and mortality' reviews: when something goes wrong, the committee reviews it without blame and asks what the system should have caught. The bank's error-tracking process is modelled directly on this.

He and his wife Abena, a pharmacist, live in South Salem with their two teenage daughters. He returns to Kumasi every other year, and has funded a clinic there since 2010.