At Long Last, a New Administrator for CMS?

WASHINGTON—Rumors are circulating that in his State of the
Union address tonight, President Obama could name a new
administrator for CMS.

According to some reports, Glenn Steele Jr., MD, PhD, president
and CEO of Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health System, has
emerged as a favorite to lead the agency, which has been without a
permanent administrator since Mark McClellan left the post in
October 2006. Other sources believe Don Berwick, president and CEO
of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, could get
the nod.

 His official biography notes Steele joined Geisinger in
2001 from the University of Chicago, where he served as the Richard
T. Crane Professor in the Department of Surgery, vice president for
medical affairs and dean of the Division of Biological Sciences and
the Pritzker School of Medicine. A past chairman of the American
Board of Surgery, he is widely recognized for his investigations
into the treatment of primary and metastatic liver cancer and
colorectal cancer surgery.

At a Senate Finance Committee roundtable on health reform in
April of 2009, committee members questioned Steele at length about
Geisinger’s care coordination for the chronically ill. 
Steele said the health system had developed care standards for
chronic diseases like diabetes, coronary artery disease, congestive
heart failure and kidney disease. 

“What we’ve shown is that when you increase quality
for these groups of high-utilizing patients, you’re also
decreasing costs,” Steele told the committee.

He also said the system rewarded physicians and nurses who
improved patient care, and that utilizing electronic health records
was another factor in Geisinger’s success.

In November, Steele was appointed to the board of directors of
WellCare Health Plans, concurrent with the resignation from the
board of Ruben King-Shaw. King-Shaw, CEO of DME provider All-Med
Services of Florida, is a former COO and deputy administrator of
CMS.

Don Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP, is an authority on health care
quality and improvement, according to his biography. He is a
clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy at the
Harvard Medical School, and professor in the Department of Health
Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He
also has served as vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task
Force, a member of the board of trustees of the American Hospital
Association and chair of the National Advisory Council of the
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Speaking to The New York Times in August about the long
vacancy in the CMS top spot, one observer told the newspaper the
agency was “running on autopilot.”

The massive agency provides health insurance to 98 million
people, pays 1.2 billion claims a year and has an annual budget of
more than $700 billion, reporter Robert Pear pointed out. 

As for the vacancy’s impact on HME, “it’s been
very harmful to us,” said Wayne Stanfield. The top people
left at the agency, said Stanfield, president and CEO of the
National Association of Independent Medical Equipment Suppliers,
“are the ones that created the issues that we’re facing
… and until there’s a head of CMS, those people are
going to continue to go down the path they have been for the past
eight years.”

For more, see Room at the Top: Who’s in Charge at CMS?, Aug.
24, 2009.