Dr. Jaewon Ryu is Geisinger's new president and CEO, the Danville, Pa.-based integrated health system announced Thursday.
Ryu has served as interim president and CEO since November and executive vice president and chief medical officer since September 2016. He succeeds Dr. David Feinberg, who left Geisinger earlier this year to work for Google.
"We have a big opportunity to make health easier," Ryu said, noting Geisinger's ability to take world-class programs and care models and deliver them to the masses.
Ryu said he aims to build on Geisinger's programs related to home care, DNA sequencing, nutrition, transportation, opioids, primary care, digital health, readmissions and clinical variation, among others.
Geisinger leveraged its integrated insurance and care delivery network to launch its own mail-order pharmacy, boosting medication adherence rates by more than a third while cutting out-of-pocket costs, Ryu said. Its Fresh Food Farmacy program offers free healthy food to patients with chronic diseases like diabetes. The Geisinger at Home program delivers regular checkups, testing, urgent and specialty care to chronically ill patients, he said.
"House calls were part of the norm in healthcare 50 years ago. We are doing nothing different than getting back to that," Ryu said, adding that increasing the amount of time clinicians spend with patients coupled with wraparound services have driven down hospital and ED admission rates. "We do that by addressing basic things like food, shelter and transportation."
Prior to joining Geisinger, Ryu was president of integrated care delivery for Humana, overseeing the insurer's owned and joint ventured care delivery practices, as well as Transcend, a management services organization helping affiliated practices adopt population health under value-based reimbursement.
He was the chief medical officer at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and has various leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, the CMS and as a White House fellow at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
"I learned about Geisinger while working at CMS 12 years ago as they were implementing innovative payment models," Ryu said. "Having the opportunity to come here and now lead the organization, I am tremendously honored and excited for what is in store."
The integrated health system includes 13 hospitals, a nearly 600,000-member health plan, two research centers and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine as well as around 32,000 employees and 1,800 employed physicians.
Geisinger reported an operating income of $183.9 million on revenue of $6.54 billion in 2018, up from $159.8 million of operating income on $6 billion of revenue in 2017.
For the first nine months of the 2019 fiscal year, the integrated health system posted $134.1 million in operating income on revenue of $5.3 billion. Geisinger benefited from a 5.7% boost in net patient service revenue related to market share growth and higher high-acuity, clinical service volumes. Inpatient and outpatient surgeries rose 4.7% and 4.2%, respectively, from the same period the year prior, the company said.
Geisinger and Highmark Health completed their clinical joint venture in March, aiming to boost access to primary care, specialty care and acute inpatient care in north central Pennsylvania.
Going forward, there is opportunity to pursue more joint ventures and build around the growing Medicare Advantage population as well as the broader demographic of Medicare beneficiaries, Ryu said.
"That is a growing segment of the population with tremendous care needs that lines up well with our programs," he said.