J. Edward McEachern, M.D.
Director for Health Services Research
Dr. McEachern is the Director for Health Services Research for the Orthopaedic Center and the University of Utah’s Department of Orthopaedics and past physician CEO of the University of Utah’s Orthopaedic Hospital and the Department of Orthopaedics, is a member of the faculty in the Department of Orthopaedics at the University of Utah. To those roles, Dr. J. Edward McEachern brings strengths well matched to the challenges facing physicians, payers, and hospitals today. His pioneering approaches to improving the service delivery and outcomes of clinical services are recognized across the United States and in other countries. Further, as the director of Health Services Research, he continues to innovate through research that forges partnerships "across the continuum" of care to apply unorthodox but highly effective approaches to the design of health services and systems that provide superior value in terms of costs, outcomes, and satisfaction.
After completing in a second residency (in General Internal Medicine) and performing research at Case Western Reserve University and MetroHealth Medical Center's Department of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio. While in Cleveland, he also served as the associate director of the Case Western Reserve Center for Health Services Research and Improvement, as special assistant to Metro Health Medical System on quality, and as a faculty member at Case Western University School of Medicine.
At Daedalus Private Equity, Dr. McEachern was the physician senior partner managed the firm’s strategic investments in hospitals, software and technology development firms, wholesale drug manufacturers, and re-insurers. His experience in operations, research, and consulting give him the opportunity to work with physicians, other clinicians, and managers in a variety of hospital and healthcare settings. In particular, he has successfully demonstrated the ability to engage collaborative multi-disciplinary teams in improving the quality of direct patient care. At the same time, he is experienced in designing and managing not only integrated health services of superior value plans but also organizations such as HMOs, IPAs, and MSOs to provide them.
As the Vice President for Medical Affairs at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, where he managed the operations of "all things clinical" as well as played a key operational role in the enterprise, controlling over half of the operational budget for the health system.
As the Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of the Northeast Ohio Community Health Plan in Cleveland, Ohio, the 1.6 million covered life managed health plan for Blue Shield and Blue Cross of Ohio, he developed innovative approaches to working with providers, payers, and patient / members to improve health, lower costs and demonstrate better health outcomes.
Dr. McEachern built and ran a 2,800 practice, 8,500 physician MSO in 30 states with gross revenues of $80 million for the SunHealth alliance (now Premier) in Charlotte, NC.
Dr. McEachern was Vice President for Medical Affairs at Hospital Corporation of America (HCA)'s West Paces Ferry Hospital in Atlanta, and quality improvement consultant for direct patient care to HCA's Corporate Office in Nashville, Tenn.
He was also a quality improvement consultant to the nation's first funded (by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) multi-center randomized clinical trial of clinical quality improvement methods. He is the author of four books and numerous articles on quality improvement, and is on the editorial review board for Medical Care, The Health System Leader, and the ASQC Press. He has developed and taught courses for HCA, the Joint Commission, the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory University as well as the Nordic School of Public Health.
After earning his M.D. degree at Case Western Reserve University in 1989, Dr. McEachern completed a health services research fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and a Pathology residency at the University of California in San Francisco. He worked in Atlanta, GA at HCA’s West Paces Ferry Hospital before returning to Case Western Reserve University for a second residency in General Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Health Services Research. He currently is on faculty at Case Western Reserve's MetroHealth Medical Center in the Research Faculty, and is a member of the University of Utah’s Orthopaedic Faculty as Director of Health Services Research. He has also worked at Vanderbilt University's Center for Health Services.
A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. McEachern earned an undergraduate degree in biology at Emory University. After graduating, he was named to a year-long honours program of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland as a Robert T. (Bobby) Jones Scholar, where he earned a co-terminal masters degree in biological systems theory and statistics.
Dr. McEachern's consulting and research relate directly to issues in today's healthcare environment. While based at West Paces Ferry Hospital, he worked with the HCA Quality Resource Group to implement continuous quality improvement in direct patient care in any clinical environment. Sites included HCA-owned hospitals as well as Henry Ford Medical Center in Detroit, George Washington University Hospitals in Washington, D. C., and Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque. He set up and staffed a Corporate Health Services unit at West Paces Ferry Hospital, directly contracting with more than 20 corporate clients for health delivery (Including Delta Airlines, Lockheed, and NationsBank).
Dr. McEachern also developed clinical research corporations to study clinical quality improvement methodologies at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas, and West Paces Ferry. He implemented concurrent continuous improvement of patients' health care across organizations of providers and purchasers, managing costs and clinical outcomes. He participated with Gene Nelson, David Gustafson, Tom Nolan, and others in the development of valid and reliable outcomes measures of patient health status and patient evaluation of services. These measures are being piloted now in five chest pain teams nationwide. He also developed a tool to estimate the total costs of illness for purchasers of care.
Internationally, Dr. McEachern developed a universal model of direct patient care quality improvement for use in over 120 lesser-developed countries for the U. S. Agency for International Development. He designed and helped implement the Peace Corps' world-wide medical corps quality improvement plan, and provided consultation for the governments of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Zimbabwe in the design and redesign of their health care delivery systems.
