Mitesh Patel, MD, vice president and chief clinical transformation officer at St. Louis-based Ascension, is leaving the health system after five years.
Dr. Patel announced the news in an Oct. 29 LinkedIn post.
“It is hard to capture what the last five years have meant to me,” he wrote. “I’m incredibly grateful to the leaders who gave me the opportunity to build and lead, to my team for everything they accomplished, and to the many colleagues across Ascension who partnered with us along the way.”
Dr. Patel said that during his tenure, Ascension built infrastructure to engage patients at scale and close care gaps across hundreds of practices. It also transformed virtual care, launched and expanded acute and ambulatory programs, and launched the Ascension Clinical Innovation Institute.
Dr. Patel is one of four leaders who direct the institute. He told Becker’s in September that Ascension tests new care models before expanding them systemwide, and that programs must work clinically, operationally and financially to scale. One example is a pre-visit text message program that started in seven practices, was tested in a randomized trial across 76 primary care practices and is now live across Ascension’s primary care practices.
He wrote in his post that meaningful transformation does not happen through technology alone.
“It happens when talented people across an organization come together around a shared purpose and are willing to challenge the status quo,” he said. “None of this work happened within a single team. It required deep partnership across clinical operations, digital, analytics, product, design, engineering, technology, strategy and many other parts of Ascension.”
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