Thomas Erlinger

OVERVIEW: Healthcare leader and practicing physician (Internal Medicine) with 24+ years of experience in chronic disease research and management, Health IT, advanced analytics, clinical pathway implementation, public and population health, health plan analytics, generative AI, product development, customer engagement, improving quality of care and lowering costs in large- scale healthcare organizations by combining expertise in medicine, analytics, and business transformation.

Keywords: clinical leadership, healthcare quality, Artificial Intelligence, epidemiology, analytics, clinical informatics, health plan, Medical Director, Chief Analytics Officer, Public Health, population health, health plan analytics, product development, customer engagement, quality assurance, infection control, research oversight, SQL, Python, medical license, strategic planning, business case development, leadership, authorship, publications.

HIGHLIGHTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS by Domain Leadership: Executive Engagement: extensive experience preparing clinical C-suite leaders (CMO, COO, CCO, CNO, CIO, CMIO, etc.) with strategic, operational and outcomes-based strategic proposals, implementation plans and outcomes.

Healthcare Operations: History of >15 years of senior leadership working with provider systems leading global healthcare analytics operations, informatics, quality assessment, medical management, quality improvement. Experience overseeing large teams (55+) and managing multi-site projects.

Clinical Quality:

• Lead national team measuring, reporting and giving strategic input for >140 hospitals in the U.S. including CMS, NHSN and AHRQ suite of metrics in addition to modeling novel and adapted safety and quality metrics.
• Lead ACO and Health Plan analytics teams measuring and strategically optimizing HEDIS and CMS quality metrics for shared savings contracts and operational management.

Analytics:In addition to conducing analyses and authoring over 60 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, I have lead analytics efforts across a variety of organizations including:

- ACO and Health plans (Seton Health Alliance and FirstCare Health Plans of Texas)

- Large national health system (Ascension)

- State level health systems (Ascension, Texas)

- State Department of Health Services (Texas DSHS)

- Elsevier Clinical Solutions - Global Analytics Leader

Clinical Informatics:I have lead Clinical Informatics teams at the State health system level have been part of informatics teams in national health system and commercial venues.

• Lead a team of over 25 clinical and pharmacology informaticists managing EHR activities across 15 hospitals
• Represented the State of Texas on Governor appointed committee overseeing HIE rollout across state of Texas
• Lead terminology and ontology teams to optimize EHR data storage and utilization for operational and clinical analytics

Research: Completed a 3-year clinical research, including a Master’s in Public Health, at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions following residency in Internal Medicine. I stayed on at Hopkins as research fellow and faculty for 8 years and have published over 60 medical research journals and book chapters on chronic disease epidemiology and management (hypertension, diabetes, cancer).

Clinical Practice: I saw patients on an inpatient and outpatient basis for over 12 years. After moving into leadership positions, I have maintained an active role as a practicing clinician and volunteer at the Austin based Volunteer Health Clinic for over 10 years. I see uninsured patients in my community with chronic disease in need of ongoing and intensified management. It is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever engaged in. Prior to this experience, I also had experience volunteering in a healthcare for the homeless clinic in Baltimore Maryland seeing patients with HIV, chronic disease, housing instability, mental illness and acute ambulatory conditions.

• May 2017: Texas Congressional Testimony - Health Information Exchange - Austin, Texas - State Capitol
• July 2019: Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) - Interoperability in HealthCare - Washington, DC - Capitol Hill
• March 2020: 17th Annual World HealthCare Congress - Using AI/ML at the Point of Care - Washington, DC
• Recently Submitted Abstracts to National Meetings:
• HIMSS 2020: Impact of Standardizing Sepsis Ordersets Across Mutiple EHR Platforms Nationally on Mortality, LOS and Cost
• HIMSS 2020: Developing a Machine Learning Model to Predict LOS Across a National Health System
• HFMA 2020: Developing and Implementing an Approach to Identifying Clinical Variation Using a Standardized Cost
• Framework

• Texas State Medical License (M5149) Diplomate, National Board of Medical Examiners 1993
• Experience implementing solutions across large geographic areas and large complex institutions: Launched a multimodal pain management process across 126+ hospitals across U.S. to reduce opioid utilization by 35% Launched analytic solutions driving Enterprise quality and cost-effectiveness interventions across the largest non-profit health system in the U.S. Lead epidemiologic activities for the State of Texas Lead efforts to modernize, augment and scale analytics for the largest global oncology clinical decision support solution on the market Public Health: Served as the State Epidemiologist for Texas leading major CDC grant reducing chronic disease risk and disparities across Texas. Key interface with federal CDC officials. Experience working at scale across regional, national and international geographies and in complex matrixed organizations. Lead and represented the Texas Public Health agency in Health IT strategic planning and implementation. Population Health: Oversaw clinical quality and analytics teams seeking to optimize HEDIS measures performance across health plans. Analytics team developed novel methods for identifying emerging care patterns including adherence/non-adherence to guidelines of care, care plan development and risk optimization. Served on Governor appointed committees involving healthcare quality and HIT. - Lead quality team achieving first-time NCQA certification - Served as Medical Director for ACO - Oversaw quality and care plan development for ACO - Lead clinical quality engagement with community healthcare providers under ACO - Leveraged combined payer datasets for market insights (Definitive Healthcare) Commercial: Deeply integrated into commercial strategy and execution across Elsevier Global Clinical Solutions Clinical Analytics - lead team creating and bringing to market analytics solutions aimed at improving clinical insights for senior clinical leadership within complex healthcare organizations in a HIPAA and GDPR compliant manner. Delivered customer-specific insights for oncology pathway utilization for the largest oncology Clinical Decision Support (CDS) solution in the US (Clinical Path Oncology) - consistently winning top awards for content, EHR integration and wrap around analytics. Product Analytics - established the first dedicated product analytics team across global Elsevier Clinical Solutions portfolio of products, including Order Sets, Care Planning, Oncology Decision support, Patient Engagement and reference products including point of care solutions. Product Development - worked on numerous cross-functional teams including product, UX, tech, commercial to develop early MVP, prototypes and mature implemented products for clinical systems ranging from CDS to analytics.

• I have extensive experience using standard and non-standard MS Office tools including Power Automate.
• Extensive experience using and overseeing analytics teams leveraging R, Python, SQL, Snowflake, AWS, Tableau, PowerBI
• Oversaw team assisting with transition of data infrastructure from Redshift to Snowflake at Elsevier

• I have extensive experience using standard and non-standard MS Office tools including Power Automate.
• Extensive experience using and overseeing analytics teams leveraging R, Python, SQL, Snowflake, AWS, Tableau, PowerBI
• Oversaw team assisting with transition of data infrastructure from Redshift to Snowflake at Elsevier

Played in bluegrass band for >10 years in Austin, Tx.