Leadership & Advisory Board
Fred Hobby
Fred Hobby serves as an active member of the InveniasPartners Advisory Board, and provides leadership to the firm’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Practice. Fred is based in our Chicago corporate office.
In addition, Fred serves as the Chief Diversity Strategist for CulturaLink, LLC, a full-service language assistance and health equity consulting company in Atlanta, Georgia.
Previously, Fred Hobby joined the American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity in Health Management (Institute) as president and CEO in 2005 with more than 25 years of experience in senior leadership in hospital operations and administration. Fred’s career includes service across three states and six hospital systems. Fred led the Institute into its second decade of service, developing tools and resources to promote, enhance and implement diversity efforts in our nation’s hospitals. During his term as president, the Institute experienced unprecedented growth in influence, membership, and played a pivotal role in the creation and professional development of the Chief Diversity Officer role in health care.
Fred began his hospital administration career with Humana, Inc. in Louisville, KY after serving 4 years as the Executive Director of the City’s Affirmative Action Department and 3 years on the faculty of the University of Louisville.
Before joining the Institute, Fred spent 10 years with the Greenville (SC) Hospital System (GHS), a 1,086-bed acute care teaching hospital system. As an administrator and chief diversity officer at GHS, he developed and implemented a system-wide diversity initiative that is nationally recognized for its comprehensiveness and success. Its components included diversity education for senior leadership and cultural competence training for the system’s 7,200 employees. While in this role, Fred developed an extensive Language Assistance and Interpretation Center to improve services the rapidly growing number of limited English speaking patients and the hard of hearing. The GHS Language Assistance Center was one of the first of its kind in a hospital setting and is only 1of 2 programs in the country to receive a recognition letter from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights acknowledging the hospital’s compliance with the Federal LEP Guidelines. Fred is generally regarded as the first full time, fully dedicated, Chief Diversity Officer in a healthcare setting.
Prior to joining GHS, Fred served as an aspiring Assistant Administrator with Humana, Inc., the Chief Operating Officer with the Portsmouth General Hospital and is a former CEO of the Newport News General Hospital in Virginia.
He is a frequent guest speaker on diversity and has been featured speaker at numerous prestigious national conferences. In 1999, he was named “Senior Executive of the Year” by the National Association for Health Services Executives. Fred was named to Modern Healthcare magazine’s “100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare” in August 2006 and again 2007. He was the cover story in the 2006 Winter Issue of HR Pulse, the official publication of the American Society for Healthcare Human Resource Administration. In 2010, Fred was selected to serve on the National Project Advisory Committee of the Office of Minority Health to revise and enhance the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) in Health and Healthcare. The Chicago Defender appointed Fred to their Man of Excellence roster in 2010. In 2015, Fred received ACHE’s President’s Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from NAHSE.
Fred has served on numerous boards including two terms on the National Board of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters, The South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs, The Urban League of the Upstate, and is the Founding President of the South Carolina Chapter of the National Association of Health Services and Executives.
Fred received a Bachelor’s Degree in history and political science from Kentucky State University in Frankfort, KY, and a Master of Arts degree in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis.