Health care leader helped shape AHA policy

H. Robert Cathcart, administrator at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hospital for 43 years until his retirement in 1991, and a health care leader who helped shape AHA policy, died earlier today in Waverly, a Philadelphia suburb. He was 92. Cathcart served as AHA chairman in 1976, received the association’s Distinguished Service Award in 1983 for his contributions to the health care field, and was inducted into the Health Care Hall of Fame in 1997. AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack called Cathcart “one of the health care giants. Much of the AHA’s movement during the second half of the 20th century toward a vision of hospitals as grand instruments for community service, of pushing clinical services into the community beyond the walls of the hospital, had Bob Cathcart’s fingerprints all over it.”