In this three-minute video, University of Pennsylvania Health System Chief Medical Officer Patrick Brennan, MD, opens the lecture event memorializing the late Norman Wall, MD.
Guest speaker at the Norman Wall Memorial Lecture at Penn's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) was Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc

Guest speaker at the Norman Wall Memorial Lecture at Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) was Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc, FACP, Chief Population Health Officer at New York City Health + Hospitals. H+H is the largest municipal health system in the United States with 1.2 million patients, 30% of whom are uninsured. An alum of the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School, Chokshi is focused on improving population health services throughout H+H’s 11 hospitals, 5 nursing homes, 74 clinics and a Medicare ACO with 11,000 patients across New York’s five boroughs.

University of Pennsylvania Health System Chief Medical Officer, Patrick J. Brennan, MD
Patrick J. Brennan, MD and Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc

University of Pennsylvania Health System Chief Medical Officer, Patrick J. Brennan, MD, (above, left) opened the Norman Wall Memorial Lecture with recollections of being both a teenage patient as well as an adult medical student of Wall’s in Pottsville, Pa. where he grew up (see video above). Above, right, Brennan hosted a pre-event meeting that brought together Chokshi and a gathering of former Penn colleagues, faculty members and researchers. The population health services expert explained how H+H is using its ACO as a test bed for innovations it plans to implement across the rest of its system.

Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc
Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc, Jack Greenberg, MD, and Norman Wall's son, Harry Wall

So far (above, left), Chokshi said, empowering clinical leadership on the ACO front lines with better actionable patient data, and developing a new in-house system to more accurately identify patient risk, has resulted in a five-year savings of $36 million and improved outcomes. Above, right, chatting afterwards are (l to r) Chokshi, former Norman Wall colleague Jack Greenberg, MD, and Norman Wall’s son, Harry Wall.

Dave Chokshi, MD, MSc, presenting in the auditorium of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI)

“Our task,” Chokshi told the audience, “is to go from the work we’ve done in our ACO and bring these changes to the full population of 1.2 million patients we serve. Our story is a great example of necessity being the mother of invention in a safety net setting like ours. We have had to go from the lofty vision of ‘population health’ and get much more hard nosed about what it means to actually change the way care is delivered on the ground. Population health is fundamentally about a more proactive approach to addressing avoidable human suffering.”