Meet Dr. Jaewon Ryu, Geisinger's new chief executive

Dr. Jaewon Ryu last week was named Geisinger’s president and CEO, a role he’s held in an interim capacity since late last year. Ryu, who joined Geisinger as chief medical officer in 2016 after leading Humana’s integrated care delivery arm, shared at least one of his visions for the Danville, Pa.-based health system: Making health “easier,” he told Modern Healthcare last week.

Here are a few of the community and preventive health initiatives Ryu said he plans to build on to reach that goal.

Geisinger in 2018 announced a plan to integrate DNA sequencing into routine patient care. At the time, the health system’s then-CEO Dr. David Feinberg, who left to lead healthcare initiatives at Google, called genetic testing “an essential part” of Geisinger’s shift toward a preventive healthcare strategy—rather than “responsive sick care.”

Geisinger at Home, a program Ryu led implementation of as CMO, delivers regular checkups, testing, and urgent and specialty care to chronically ill patients in their homes. The program helped reduce the rate of hospital admissions by 48% and emergency department utilization by 43%, Ryu said in January.

Geisinger opened Fresh Food Farmacy, an education and nutrition program, in 2016 at the Geisinger Shamokin Area Community Hospital in Coal Township, Pa., as an avenue to supply food-insecure diabetes patients with healthy food. The site now serves roughly 200 patients each week, and in March the program opened its second location in Scranton, Pa.

In November, Geisinger unveiled a “redesign” of its surgical program that aims to improve pain management while reducing opioid prescriptions. The program, dubbed ProvenRecovery, manages patient pain through various combinations of approaches, rather than relying on opioids. It’s helped to cut down the use of opioids in surgery by 18% since its launch, according to Geisinger.

Perhaps Ryu’s most ambitious project as CMO involved a revamp of the health system’s primary-care operations, which aimed to free up clinicians to allow them to spend more time with patients. More generally, Geisinger is working to boost care access systemwide, and in March finalized a joint venture with Highmark Health to improve healthcare services in north central Pennsylvania.