President Barack Obama nominated Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard health policy professor and a pediatrician, to be administrator of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. The White House announced the nomination April 19 after signaling its intention to do so last month.
Berwick is also president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a not-for-profit organization that strives to improve healthcare quality worldwide.
Berwick has "dedicated his career to improving outcomes for patients and providing better care at lower cost," Obama said in a statement. "That's one of the core missions facing our next CMS administrator."
If confirmed by the Senate, Berwick will be CMS' first permanent administrator since 2006. Charlene Frizzera has been acting administrator since January.
Berwick has been a strong advocate for evidence-based medicine, according to Kerry Weems, who was acting CMS administrator from September 2007 until January and is now senior vice president for health strategy at Vangent, a provider of information and business process services.
"I think his strong emphasis on quality measures, quality of care and evidence-based medicine signals that the administration is looking to make healthcare reform work in terms of making sure that the healthcare that is out there is in fact the healthcare that we need," he said.
CMS has a critical role to play in carrying out the recently enacted health reform law.
"The legislation is going to have literally thousands of pages of regulations behind it," Weems said. "It's going to have resource demands. And every one of those regulatory and resource battles needs to be fought by an administrator who has the confidence of the president and the U.S. Senate."
Under the health reform law, Medicaid, the agency's program for low-income households, will expand health coverage for millions more Americans in 2014. The agency must also phase in billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare, the insurance program for seniors.
CMS will also direct about $25 billion in payment incentives to qualified physicians and hospitals that become meaningful users of electronic health records starting in 2011 as called for by the stimulus law.
According to his biography, Berwick has served as vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the first independent member of the board of trustees of the American Hospital Association, and chairman of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
He has received numerous awards, including the 1999 Joint Commission's Ernest Amory Codman Award for his work in quality improvement, the 2002 American Hospital Association's Award of Honor, the 2006 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Individual Achievement from the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
In 2005, he was appointed an Honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire by the Queen of England for his work with the British National Health Service. Berwick, who has authored the books, Curing Health Care and Escape Fire, graduated from Harvard Medical School and also received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard.
