Dr. Jaewon Ryu
Last week, Geisinger Health System hired Dr. Jaewon Ryu as executive vice president and CMO. While he doesn’t start until late September, Ryu is excited to be joining a tightly integrated organization that includes both an expansive provider network and a health plan.
Ryu is the first C-suite hire for Geisinger President and CEO Dr. David T. Feinberg, who took over in February 2015.
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“I’ve been a fan of Geisinger for a while,” said Ryu, who currently serves as president of integrated care delivery at health insurer Humana. This goes back to when he was at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Since then, Ryu also has worked at Kaiser Permanente and was CMO of the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System in Chicago.
Specifically, Ryu likes the fact that Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger, for the most part, has the payment incentives aligned with care delivery in most of its service area. “Geisinger has been known for innovation,” Ryu added. The health system also has a “nice mix of rural and urban” settings in which to innovate and try to raise the standard of care, he said.
This creates opportunities to improve population health, one of the pillars of the Triple Aim. That is something he has been pushing at Humana. “There a lot more things in common [between Geisinger and Humana] than are different,” Ryu said.
One of the commonalities is a deep collection of patient data, particularly claims records. As a delivery network, Geisinger obviously possesses more clinical data than Humana, though. “Having both is very powerful,” Ryu noted.
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In the realm of data, Ryu is particularly enthused about Geisinger’s MyCode Community Health Initiative for precision medicine and the organization’s Precision Health Center in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania. On April 25 — National DNA Day — Geisinger announced that it had surpassed its goal of signing up 100,000 people for the MyCode biobank and genomic sequencing study, and was raising the goal to 250,000.
“The promise of something like that is taking another set of information … and being able to integrate it into clinical practice,” said Ryu, who is board-certified in emergency medicine and also holds a law degree.
Ryu wasn’t familiar with the recent inflammatory comments by American Medical Association CEO Dr. James Madara, who compared digital health to “snake oil.” Ryu said he was a fan of a lot of technologies in healthcare, though he qualified his statements.
“EHRs, when used right, are very powerful tools, but there is no silver bullet out there,” the incoming Geisinger CMO said. He is enthusiastic about apps, even consumer-facing ones. “I view the opportunity to view the health of consumers as only a good thing,” Ryu said.
Photo: PRNewsFoto/Geisinger Health System
