Cástulo de la Rocha

As President and CEO of AltaMed Health Services Corporation, Cástulo de la Rocha is an enduring trailblazer in community health. Under his visionary leadership, AltaMed has transformed from a storefront barrio clinic in East Los Angeles into the largest Federally Qualified Health Center in the nation.

In 1977, Mr. de la Rocha recognized that people in low-income neighborhoods throughout Southern California were significantly underserved by essential health resources—the Barrio Free Clinic in his neighborhood often had a line of people wound around the block. By acknowledging that the health of a neighborhood is tied to its prosperity, he changed the face of one community, then another, until AltaMed became one of the area’s largest health care systems, with approximately 50 medical, dental, and Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) sites staffed by 3,200 employees, providing compassionate care to more than 300,000 patients each year.

Mr. de la Rocha’s “whole community” approach to health care has earned him the Leader in Action award from the PRIME Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (2016). In 2017, he was honored alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda with a Medallion of Excellence from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI). In 2018, he received the Aaron L. Brown Memorial Public Service Award from the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), and in 2019, he was recognized as a distinguished alumnus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.