Marcy Doderer

An internship at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in the summer of 1988 helped pave the way for Marcy Doderer’s career.

“I was looking for a place to find my niche in business that would be a complex, challenging environment, and yet, as a person, I really wanted to work somewhere that had a positive impact on other people,” she said. “And once I learned about health care as a business … it seemed to be a really great fit.”

Born at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, Doderer moved with her family to Little Rock when she was in elementary school. She graduated from Little Rock Central High School in 1985 and then went to Trinity University in San Antonio, where she majored in business finance. After graduating from Trinity, she went to the University of Iowa and received a Master of Arts in hospital and health administration in 1992.

She worked in small and large hospitals before being named president and CEO of Arkansas Children’s in 2013. Arkansas Children’s has more than $700 million in net revenue annually and about 4,400 employees and works with another 500 to 600 medical providers.

Under Doderer’s leadership, Arkansas Children’s opened a $167 million, 230,000-SF hospital in Springdale in 2018. Arkansas Children’s also launched a statewide network of care, which brings children’s health services closer to where children live.

“One of the most important things I do as a CEO is to make sure we have a culture that’s very attentive to the development of people, so that we can inspire our team members to bring their A-game to work every single day,” she said.

Away from Arkansas Children’s, Doderer serves on the executive committee of the Little Rock Regional Chamber. In January 2018, she joined the Arkansas chapter of the International Women’s Forum, an invitation-only organization that supports women leaders.

Doderer said that every morning she’s “excited to come to work and figure out how we’re going to make life better for kids. But when I leave here in the evenings, I do often wonder what we may have missed or how we might have pushed ourselves farther to improve their care even more.”

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