Washington, D.C. - Dec. 18, 2006 - At its annual meeting Nov. 29 the Bridges To Excellence (BTE) Board of Directors elected new officers and directors for 2007. George Chedraoui, global well being services leader for IBM, was named president and board chair; Thomas H. Lee, MD, chief executive officer of Partners Community HealthCare, will serve as secretary; and Charles Montreuil, vice president of corporate human resources for Carlson Companies, will be treasurer.
Elected as directors were Delia Vetter, senior director of benefits for EMC Corporation, and Jeffrey Rideout, MD, Cisco’s chief medical officer and vice president of the internet business solutions group, healthcare. Continuing board members include Pascale Thomas of Verizon, Steve Nord of UPS, Allan Korn of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Vince Kerr of UnitedHealth Group, George Isham of HealthPartners, Andrew Webber of the National Business Coalition on Health, and Suzanne Delbanco of the Leapfrog Group.
BTE is a not-for-profit organization created to encourage significant leaps in the quality of care by recognizing and rewarding health care providers for meeting specific quality criteria. More than 100 employers, a number of large employer groups and all of the country’s largest health plans actively participate in BTE’s programs.
BTE’s executive committee and board will be headed by George Chedraoui throughout 2007.
It is an honor to become BTE’s president. We have a great plan for this new year and an outstanding team to execute it, Chedraoui said. I’m pleased to announce that Dale Whitney, BTE’s outgoing president, will become board chair emeritus and lead the development of a number of critical board subcommittees.
A California-based consortium has recently agreed to be recognized as a BTE initiative. In early 2006, Cisco, Intel and Oracle announced the formation of the Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium, which aims to encourage physician practices in Silicon Valley to adopt and use better systems of care, including electronic health records. The consortium’s first action was to offer incentives for physicians to demonstrate their systems of care by achieving NCQA’s Physician Practice Connections recognition. Seven large multi-practice medical groups who provide care for the consortium’s employees have joined this effort, and CIGNA signed on in a key sponsorship role.
Consistent with the public and private sectors’ joint efforts to create a value-driven health care system, the Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium helps us work toward quality and value goals in a collaborative manner, said Dr. Rideout. BTE’s programs will also support these efforts and allow us to extend the initiative across the country.
BTE’s operating plans for 2007 call for a doubling of implementation regions, the introduction of two new programs - the Spine Care Link and the Internal Medicine Care Link - and a growing relationship with emerging state and/or regional health information exchanges and organizations. Aetna, CIGNA, Humana, United, WellPoint, and many regional health plans currently license BTE’s programs and are implementing them in more than a dozen states.
We’re at a critical time in the growth of the organization and need guidance and leadership from all our key stakeholders, said Francois de Brantes, national coordinator of BTE. The addition of Dr. Rideout, who was previously the chief medical officer of Blue Shield of California and also headed the Blue Shield of California Foundation, has been instrumental in bringing BTE to California. Delia Vetter, who is a recognized benefits leader and an active supporter of BTE in Massachusetts and North Carolina, gives us additional critical expertise depth on our board.
One of the original BTE pilot sites has been Massachusetts. Thanks to BTE’s efforts in that state, there are currently thousands of physicians who have adopted better systems of care and improved both the quality and cost of care.
EMC Corporation’s benefit programs are designed to assist employees in making good decisions about their health and their health care, Vetter said. BTE’s programs allow us to involve physicians in all the communities where we have employees and provide them with information that can fully engage them in their decisions.
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About Bridges to Excellence
Bridges to Excellence (BTE) is a not-for-profit, coalition-based organization created to encourage significant leaps in the quality of care by recognizing and rewarding health care providers who demonstrate that they deliver safe, timely, effective, and patient-centered care. BTE works with large employers, health plans, providers and a wide range of organizations that have a shared goal of improving quality and patient outcomes. For more information go to www.bridgestoexcellence.org.
For more information about HHS’s Value-Driven Health Care initiative, go to http://transparency.cit.nih.gov/.
EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation. All other products and services mentioned are trademarks of their respective companies.