Kaiser Permanente is hiring an integrated care specialist but organizational outsider as its new chief medical officer, as the focus on innovation comes to the fore.
Patrick Courneya, MD, the medical director at Minnesota-based HealthPartners Health Plan, will join the nation's largest integrated managed care and delivery network in May, as CMO and executive vice president of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.
Courneya, a family physician who spent 25 years in clinical practice, is being tasked with overseeing KP's national quality program and advocating for "the advancement of evidence-based medicine and proven innovation," said Kaiser chairman and CEO Bernard Tyson.
"Dr. Courneya is the perfect addition to our team to deliver on our commitment to total health, which is central to our mission," Tyson said in a media release.
Courneya has spent the past decade as health plan medical director at HealthPartners, an integrated care cooperative founded in 1957 and now the nation's largest consumer-governed non-profit health organization, with about 1.5 million medical and dental health plan members across Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota and North Dakota.
Also leading HealthPartner's online clinic venture, virtuwell, Courneya oversaw clinical policy for the health plan, including a number of quality improvement programs that mirror some of Kaiser's approaches.
One initiative that brought a fair amount of success was in diabetes care, Courneya recounted at a recent Federal Trade Commission forum,
In a program tracking diabetic patients' health across five benchmarks, the cooperative's performance increased from initially meeting 10 percent of all benchmarks to now meeting 30 percent, with some "high performing clinics that are running in the 60 percent range," Courneya said.
"One of the thing we did to try to illustrate the benefit of that was to calculate, based on what the evidence showed, how many heart attacks were avoided, how many patients did not suffer vision loss, cardiac or kidney failure and other things," he said.
"We've driven our total cost of care down to where we're 9 percent better than the average in Minnesota and that's creating signals in the marketplace that others are responding to."
At Kaiser, which counts more than 9 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia, Courneya will oversee a vast army of clinicians and support staff that's increasingly turning to its equally vast clinical database to look for better ways of treating diseases like obesity, heart disease and cancer, as well as meeting patients beyond the boundaries of the traditional clinic.
"At a time when healthcare is in a state of rapid change, we will continue to advance the delivery of high-quality care in a variety of settings -- including hospitals, physician offices, online and in homes -- by making healthcare more connected and even more convenient for our members and patients," Courneya said in a media release.
Courneya, who also chairs America's Health Insurance Plans' CMO Leadership Council, will become Kaiser's CMO on May 5, following the retirement of Jed Weissberg, MD.