Lucio Fragoso
CEO | Manning Family Children’s Hospital
When Lucio Fragoso reflects on his childhood in Chicago’s South Side, he sees the children that Manning Family Children’s Hospital now serves today. The son of Mexican immigrants, he often translated for his parents at doctor’s appointments, usually in the children’s hospital emergency room.
“I looked a lot like one of the kids that we serve here in the hospital today,” he said.
Not long after joining the hospital in 2019 as its chief financial officer and chief administrative officer, Fragoso recognized that same communication barrier at Manning Family Children’s and pushed for action.
“Five years ago, we didn’t have any interpreters on staff. Now we have a team of eight,” he said. “We even started a Spanish-speaking-only clinic. We want to make sure we can serve people in the right way. Having this kind of help not only enhances communication, but quality of care, because the physicians certainly need it to get all the information they need.”
On Feb. 3, 2023, the hospital announced Fragoso’s promotion to president and CEO after John R. Nickens IV was promoted to president of hospital services and chief of pediatrics for LCMC Health, the nine-hospital health system that manages Manning Family Children’s. The hospital had just completed a $300 million campus expansion at the end of 2021 that solidified it as the Gulf South’s first and largest children’s hospital. In addition to its main campus in Uptown New Orleans, the hospital operates a network of specialty clinics across the state and into Mississippi.
On Feb. 5, 2025, during its 70th anniversary year, Children’s Hospital New Orleans announced it was rebranding to Manning Family Children’s following a partnership with New Orleans’ famous football family, the Mannings.
Fragoso is quick to credit his own family and upbringing for his success. His father worked grueling 100-hour weeks at a meat-packing plant in Chicago for 52 years, while his mother started a nonprofit serving underserved families called the Frida Kahlo Community Organization — a mission she continues across Chicago Public Schools 22 years later.
“The ThriveKids Student Wellness Project that we started here a few years ago I actually shamefully borrowed the idea from my mom and what she has been doing,” said Fragoso. “The whole idea is, how do you get closer to where kids are and support them and support the family unit? One in five kids suffers from a mental health disorder. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adolescents. That’s not acceptable. So, the thought is, let’s not wait for kids to come to us. Let’s go to where they’re at and bring them the services they need so they feel seen and heard. Now we have social workers and nurses in 200 schools across New Orleans. We’ve reduced absenteeism, we’ve reduced suspension rates. I think we did about 17,000 mental health consults in schools, versus them having to come to a clinic or the hospital.”
ThriveKids isn’t the only community outreach program Fragoso has led since taking over as CEO. In April 2023, the hospital announced that it was partnering with the New Orleans Health Department and a national program called Be SMART to promote responsible gun ownership and reduce firearm deaths. While suicide is the second leading cause of deaths for children, guns are the first in Louisiana. So far, the program has distributed more than 2,200 gun safes to families across Orleans Parish, contributing to record-low violent crime rates.
The oldest of three boys, Fragoso was the first person in his family to attend college. He earned an accounting degree from Loyola University Chicago and went to work for the accounting firm KPMG, where he worked as an auditor for hospitals.
“You’d go into a hospital, spend about six weeks and you’d tell them the issues that are wrong and then you’d leave, but you never really saw any benefit to what you’re doing right and for me, I realized I’d rather be a contributor than a critic.”
He went to work for one of his clients and then eventually got into pediatric health care. Fragoso worked at Lurie Children’s in Chicago and then Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston for seven years before being recruited to New Orleans.
Just like he’s pushed the hospital he leads to think beyond its walls, Fragoso’s work ethic and desire to set big goals and achieve them extends outside of his work.
This past summer, Fragoso finally completed Colorado’s Leadville Trail 100. One of the world’s most difficult ultramarathons, the grueling race takes runners through 15,000 feet of elevation gain. It was his third attempt, but after 29 hours, 12 minutes and 16 seconds, he crossed the finish line with 15-year-old Brian Marelo, born with spina bifida and now a wheelchair athlete, who he invited to join him for the final mile.
For Fragoso the personal and the professional are always intertwined. In this case, he used the race to raise more than $250,000 for the hospital, running each mile holding the name of a Manning Family Children’s patient.
“Their determination and strength carried me through each step,” Fragoso says. “Our kids are my inspiration every single day.”
On His Leadership Style
“Leadership is a lifestyle, number one, that has four key traits.
Number one, I lead with positivity. As a leader, you set the tone for the organization. Do you see problems, or do you see opportunities? How you show up to the organization matters. Remember you could make or break somebody’s day with one word.
Number two, you have to make a personal investment in the team…It’s why I meet every new employee. It’s why I interview every physician. I interview every leadership position. I think it’s important that people should know who their leader is. And if I’m responsible for you, I should know who you are. I think here in New Orleans, especially, that relationship and human connection part are so important.
Number three, you have to execute — get stuff done. That’s a key thing that I try and tell everybody, is to learn to be that person whogets things done no matter what’s asked of you. Figure out how to do it and move it forward.
The last one is, to me, is the most important. You have to be a role model. Who you are at work is driven by who you are outside of work. The things I do outside of this place make me who I am, so I need to be focused on being the best version of myself outside of here — the best husband, the best son, challenging myself to do difficult things and pushing myself outside of my own comfort zone. My own personal goal for myself is to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done that year, and then every year you up the ante.”
On His Typical Day
“On a typical day we’re going to have about 200 kids inside the hospital, maybe 200 come through the ER, roughly 1,100 that are coming through various clinics. There’s a huge amount of human interaction. And then we have 700 physicians and 2,500 staff that help support all of this. And then we’ve got 30 satellite clinics around the region and we’re out across the community, across 200 schools all that. At the end of the day, we’re in the people business.
So, I spend my day with people. I may be at a new employee orientation welcoming 70 new employees and laying out our vision and culture, and then have a handful of physician interviews, and then there’s rounding that happens pretty much every day across the hospital where I’m going to interact with families, our staff, our patients. My buddy Peyton on the fourth floor right now, he’s going through bone marrow transplant and can’t leave his room, so I go play basketball with Peyton in his room.
And then there’s this strategic stuff, and then there’s the business side of it. I have either a breakfast or lunch with long-tenured employees a couple times a month, anybody that’s been here 10 years or more. it’s an opportunity to celebrate them for their longevity, for their commitment to the organization and an opportunity for me to get feedback. What’s working, what’s not working.
How I run the hospital is I like to spend as little time in my office as possible.”
On The Best Professional Advice He’s Ever Received
“I’ll answer this by sharing a quick story. In my early 20s, when I was working for KPMG in my first job, and in Chicago, you play a lot of softball. I was playing like six days a week. We had this 16-year-old kid on our team named RJ. And some of the guys liked to give RJ a hard time. He had a particularly bad game one day and they were giving him a hard time. I had kind of taken RJ under my wing because I was that kid, that underdog. And his dad, unbeknownst to me, would come to every game, and he would just stand out in right field and watch the game.
The day after that particularly tough game, I got a phone call from RJ’s dad. He said, ‘Hey, this is Rich Melman. I just want to thank you for what you did for my kid. I’d like you to come meet me at my office. I want to offer you a job.’
So, I called my buddy Howie, who was on the team. And asked him who is this guy? He said, ‘You don’t know RJ’s dad? He has hundreds of restaurants around the country. The guy’s worth a couple hundred million dollars. You should go talk to him.’
So I went, nervous as all get out. I said, ‘You know, Mr. Melman, I just really appreciate the offer, but I just took a job at KPMG, and I think it’d just be in really poor taste if I quit that job…But, as long as I got you here, can I just pick your brain? He said yes. Then I asked him how he got to be so successful. He said, ‘Well, it’s easy. If I take care of you, you’ll take care of me. And always, always, take care of your best people. Don’t treat everybody the same. If they’re the best, they deserve to be treated like the best. They deserve the opportunities, the recognition, the financial success. Take care of your best people.’
I always remember those two things he said. And it all started because I was just there doing the right thing, taking care of some kid that somebody was picking on. That got me two great life lessons and leadership lessons.
On What Excites Him About The Future
“There’s a couple of things. One is that we will be the first hospital in the country that has a child enrichment center attached to it: Walker’s Imaginarium will open this year. It’s a huge deal, essentially a children’s museum attached to a children’s hospital.
We have kids who are here three months, six months, nine months, a year, even a year and a half, going through cancer treatment or burn therapy, so we wanted to figure out how to create a space for kids that essentially disguises therapy as fun, and makes fun a part of the healing process. It will be two stories, 18,000 square feet. It’s going to have a Ryan Seacrest studio in it. It’s going to have a Jazz Fest studio in it. It’s going to have a Mardi Gras float. It’s going to have a Drew Brees football zone. It’s going to have nine holes of miniature golf. Something like this has never been done in a children’s hospital before.
We are also building a brand new, state-of-the-art, 60-bed neonatology unit — a new NICU. We’re the only Level Four NICU in the state that has all of the medical and surgical specialties that are needed right to take care of the sickest and tiniest babies. This is important because we’re in a state right now where the rate of premature births continues to increase. For instance, for micropreemies — babies born at 28 weeks or earlier — we had 44 in 2025, a 30% increase over the previous year.
We’re also going to be expanding our outpatient behavioral health access across the city, across all of our schools.
And then, something I don’t think most people know, is that we’re the only children’s hospital in this entire region, and only one of a handful in the country, that has a cure for sickle cell disease. We take care of the most kids in the country that have sickle cell disease. What I’d like to see us do is continue to expand that because right now that treatment is only available for, I believe, kids 11 years and older. We want to reduce that age through clinical trials to down to age 5.
That’s so important because the quality of life with sickle cell is so poor. It’s an incredibly painful disease. The pain episodes are horrible. They’re described like shards of glass going through your veins, and untreated, it can take 30 years off a person’s life.
On Upping The Ante In 2026
“I already signed up for another 100-mile race. This one is in Steamboat, Colorado. This one has more of an increase in elevation — instead of 15,000, it’s 23,000 feet of climbing. My plan is to do two 100-mile races this year. This is all in preparation for what I want to do in 2027, which is run the Moab 240.
My wife and family are very supportive in all of this. I actually met my wife, Jill, at the start of a 200-mile relay race. She was on a team of nine and I was on a team of three. I chased her for 200 miles until she’d go out with me. We went on a date the next day.
We got married that same year, in 2010. We have five kids between us. She’s awesome. She’s the chief HR manager at LSU. She still races too, and she’s way better at it than I am, so I’ve got a good role model there.”
