HomeNews
More in this Section

Posted:

in Urban Health Matters Blog, by FAIR Health Access ,
Anthony Shih, MD, MPH, has been executive vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine (the Academy) since 2014. Established in 1847, the Academy advances solutions that promote the health and well-being of people in cities worldwide. Board-certified in Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Dr. Shih is a physician executive nationally recognized for his expertise in healthcare policy, healthcare system performance measurement, healthcare quality improvement and population health. Immediately prior to joining the Academy, Dr. Shih served as the Commonwealth Fund’s executive vice president for programs, overseeing all program and research activities for one of the nation’s most influential foundations and think tanks focused on improving the US healthcare system. Previously, Dr. Shih held several senior management roles, including chief quality officer and vice president of strategy at IPRO, an independent, nonprofit healthcare quality improvement organization. At IPRO, he developed and managed large-scale quality assessment and improvement projects for plans serving Medicare and Medicaid populations, and led IPRO’s Health Care Transparency Group, a pioneer in public reporting of healthcare performance information. Earlier in his career, Dr. Shih was assistant medical director for a community-based mental health organization serving immigrant and refugee populations in Oakland, California.

Dr. Shih spoke with the editorial team of the FAIR Health Access newsletter about his career, healthcare quality assessment, reducing healthcare disparities and improving healthcare transparency.
FHA:What influenced your decision to pursue a career in healthcare policy and healthcare system performance measurement?

AS: During my medical training and early in my career, I became discouraged by the limits of individual clinical care. The practice of medicine is powerful and certainly transforms the lives of many patients. But for socially and economically disadvantaged populations, there’s only so much a physician can do to improve their overall health with one-on-one clinical care. In addition, it is a slow way to impact large groups of people. So, I decided to pivot my focus beyond the care of individuals to the health of communities and populations. Around that time, the Institute of Medicine published the landmark report To Err Is Human (1999), the first report drawing attention to the fact that as many as 98,000 lives are lost in hospitals each year due to medical errors. The report created all these opportunities in clinical quality measurement and improvement, because suddenly hospitals and healthcare providers started paying a lot of attention to these issues and hiring physicians to do quality measurement and quality improvement. That report really changed the field, and that’s how I got into performance measurement and more population-based work. I was there at the right time and the right place. Later, my career and interests broadened beyond clinical quality improvement into more general health policy and population health.

FHA:Early in your career, you focused on serving immigrant and refugee populations. How is immigrant healthcare related to your work in reducing healthcare disparities more generally?

AS: My first job as a physician was at a community-based mental health organization that specialized in treating immigrant and refugee populations. That work opened my eyes to broader issues affecting vulnerable populations. We were treating mental health issues, primarily among children and families, but these issues were largely due to, or certainly exacerbated by, the difficult circumstances facing their particular communities—such as poverty, violence and discrimination. Even though the individual treatments we provided were helpful, I understood that to really make an impact, community-based interventions would be required. It’s not enough to provide vulnerable populations with the best clinical care; one needs to address the broader determinants of health, such as where people work, where they live, where they play, and issues like jobs, economic security, education and safe environments.