JONESBORO – St. Bernards Healthcare has named Josh Conlee as its new senior vice president of strategic services, a role that helps the healthcare system improve targeted delivery of health services, most notably in rural communities.
Prior to joining St. Bernards, Conlee spent the past five years as president of Lawrence Healthcare in Walnut Ridge. There, he oversaw operations of Lawrence Memorial Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital, and Lawrence Hall Health and Rehabilitation, a 125-bed nursing home attached to the hospital. Overall, the system’s 260 fulltime employees served approximately 8,000 people in northeast Arkansas’ Lawrence County.
Conlee, a native of north Louisiana and east Texas, earned his bachelor’s degree at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. He then earned a master’s in business administration at Millsaps before earning a master’s in health services administration from UAMS.
Conlee said his passion for rural healthcare began at UAMS, where he ultimately became the administrative director at the UAMS North Central Regional Campus in Batesville.
“As a graduate intern, I got placed into the UAMS Office of Rural Health — the rural health arm of UAMS. It was my first real exposure to rural healthcare, because I grew up in towns of what I considered small, about 70,000 people,” Conlee said. “What I learned is that healthcare serves as a local driver to numerous communities through both health services and economic injections. In fact, the economic engine in the viability of many rural settings is the hospital—is the healthcare.”
Now at St. Bernards, Conlee said he plans to use his experiences learned at Lawrence to benefit St. Bernards’ entire service area, which includes 23 counties in northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri.
“St. Bernards has a rich history of providing healthcare services where they simply did not exist,” Conlee said. “Throughout our service region, we have individual communities with unique challenges and needs. If a healthcare desert or a suboptimal healthcare service is present, our commitment has always been to identify and address it. I’m grateful to play a role in that effort.”
Conlee holds fellow status with the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). He received ACHE’s Early Career Healthcare Executive Regent’s Award in 2019 and the Arkansas Hospital Association’s C.E. Melville Young Administrator of the Year Award in 2023. He lives in Brookland with his wife, Kailey, and their two daughters, Stella and Avery.
