The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation’s Rick Gilfillan, MD, will be leaving at the end of June, just as the organization prepares to start accepting round-two grant applications for up to $1 billion in Health Care Innovation Awards. Replacing him as acting director will be Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, FAAP, SFHM, a practicing pediatric hospitalist, former director of hospital medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and HM13 keynote speaker.
Dr. Conway will continue in his current role as CMS’ chief medical officer.
“We applaud Patrick Conway’s appointment to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation,” says SHM President Eric Howell, MD, SFHM. “His work, compassion, and vision are tremendous validations of the hospitalist model as both a change agent and as a career path. Patients across the country will be the true beneficiaries of his new work.
“Hospitalists should continue to look toward the CMS Innovation Center as a leader in transforming healthcare.”
The center was created by the 2010 Affordable Care Act to offer solutions to healthcare cost and delivery problems. Its first round of 107 innovations awards, averaging $8.4 million each over three years, was announced in 2012 and included several that focused on preventing hospitalizations, avoidable rehospitalizations, and ED visits. One award went to David Meltzer, MD, PhD, FHM, of the University of Chicago to test a model in which the same doctor would see selected high-risk patients both in and out of the hospital.
Round two “provides hospitalists—who have an exceptionally broad perspective—with a unique opportunity to share new approaches to delivering the best patient care at an affordable cost,” Dr. Conway told The Hospitalist.