Patrick Conway

Patrick Conway is the deputy administrator for Innovation and Quality & CMS chief medical officer. He leads the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) at CMS. CCSQ is responsible for all quality measures for CMS, value-based purchasing programs, quality improvement programs in all 50 states, clinical standards and survey and certification of Medicare and Medicaid health care providers across the nation and all Medicare coverage decisions for treatments and services. The center’s budget exceeds $2 billion annually and is a major force for quality and transformation across Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP and the U.S. health care system. The CMS Innovation Center is responsible for testing numerous new payment and service delivery models across the nation. Models include accountable care organizations, bundled payments, primary care medical homes, state innovation models and many more. Successful models can be scaled nationally. The CMS Innovation Center budget is $10 billion over 10 years.

Previously, he was director of Hospital Medicine and an Associate Professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He was also assistance vice president for outcomes performance, responsible for leading measurement, including the electronic health record measures, and facilitating improvement of health outcomes across the health care system. Other relevant experience includes previous work as the chief Medical officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. In 2007-08, he was a White House fellow assigned to the Office of Secretary in HHS and the director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He also served as executive director of the Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research coordinating the investment of the $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research in the Recovery Act. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and completed a Master’s of Science focused on health services research and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Previously, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, serving senior management of mainly health care clients on strategy projects.

He has published articles in journals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs and Pediatrics and has given national presentations on topics, including health care policy, quality of care, comparative effectiveness, hospitalist systems and quality improvement. He is a practicing pediatric hospitalist and was selected as a Master of Hospital Medicine from the Society of Hospital Medicine. He has received the HHS Secretary’s Award for Distinguished Service. This is the Secretary’s highest distinction for excellence. He completed pediatrics residency at Harvard Medical School’s Children’s Hospital Boston, graduated with High Honors from Baylor College of Medicine and graduated summa cum laude from Texas A&M University.