Invited Speaker: Jonathan Perlin
President and CEO of The Joint Commission Enterprise to make a case for sustainable healthcare.
Focused Forum I: First Do No Harm, Then Do Good – The Case for Sustainable Healthcare
9:35-10:20 a.m. | Saturday, March 15
Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, MSHA, MACP, FACMI
President and CEO of The Joint Commission Enterprise
Picture global healthcare delivery as a country. Through that lens, it would rank as the fifth-largest producer of greenhouse gasses on the planet. Dr. Perlin will discuss the crucial connections between providing healthcare, the environment, human health, and patient safety – and the advantages for health systems that take a proactive stance in prioritizing sustainability.
Dr. Perlin became the seventh president and CEO of The Joint Commission Enterprise on March 1, 2022. The Joint Commission Enterprise includes The Joint Commission, Joint Commission Resources (JCR), Joint Commission International (JCI), and the National Quality Forum (NQF). Through these organizations, he launched the HELP Agenda domestically and internationally, providing strategic focus on health equity, environmental sustainability, learning healthcare and responsible AI, and performance integration, to better integrate improvement into normal healthcare operations.
Previously, as president of clinical operations and chief medical officer of HCA Healthcare, Dr. Perlin led clinicians, data scientists, and researchers in developing a learning health system model for improving care at the system’s 189 hospitals and 2,200 other locations. His team’s work achieved national recognition for preventing elective pre-term deliveries, reducing maternal mortality, using AI to improve sepsis survival, and developing public-private-academic partnerships for improving infection prevention and treating COVID-19. Dr. Perlin’s CHARGE consortium partnered HCA, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and academia to create a reusable platform for accelerated research using real-world evidence from the care of over 400,000 COVID inpatients.
Before HCA, Dr. Perlin was under secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) where, as CEO, he led the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to national prominence for full implementation of a national electronic health record and benchmark clinical performance. He initiated what is now known as the Million Veterans Program (MVP), which has now reached its goal of mapping one million genomes to phenotypic data to better understand mechanisms of disease in veterans and the broader population.
He has served on numerous Federal Commissions, including as a Congressional Budget Office health advisor, a member of MedPAC (Medicare Payment Advisory Commission), and as chair of the VA Special Medical Advisory Group. An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), he has co-chaired NAM action collaboratives on digital health, combating opioids and, currently, the healthcare sustainability policy, finance, and metrics workgroup through which he demonstrates leadership by having initiated sustainable healthcare certification programs for healthcare organizations domestically and abroad.
Dr. Perlin’s board service includes chairing Columbia University’s Health Policy and Management program, the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering, and he served as a trustee of Meharry Medical College for 15 years. Broadly published in the academic literature and widely sought as a speaker, Dr. Perlin is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in healthcare (Modern Healthcare #15, #9, #16 in “Top 100” in 2022, ’23, ‘24). He also maintains faculty appointments at Vanderbilt University as a clinical professor of medicine and health policy and at Virginia Commonwealth University as an adjunct professor of health administration.
