Population Health: Re-inventing Care for the Patients of Tomorrow

Dr. Nirav Vakharia is a primary care physician at the Cleveland Clinic where he also serves as Associate Chief, Value-Based Operations; President and Medical Director, Medicare Accountable Care Organization in the Community Care Unit.  In these roles he is supporting efforts to build the system’s capabilities to succeed in risk-based payment models, with a specific focus on enabling the population health strategy. He also co-leads a clinical process improvement training program that engages frontline clinicians in improvement efforts via experiential learning.  His current research projects include using public datasets to assess the cost of harm, and identification of factors that lead to preventable admissions.

Dr. Vakharia received his B.S in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed training in internal medicine and a chief residency at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. Before entering medicine he worked as a middle school math and science teacher in an underserved public school in Washington, DC.

Dr. Adam Myers was named “One of 100 Hospital and Health System CMOs to Know” by Becker’s Hospital Review – 2013 and 2014. He has extensive experience in population health as a model for improving the quality of care while reducing costs. He came to Cleveland from Texas, where he has been serving as Senior Vice President/Chief Medical Officer and Operations Officer of Texas Health Physicians Group/Enterprise; and Chair of the Clinical Integration team at Southwestern Health Resources, a private not-for-profit formed by University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Texas Health Resources. 

Dr. Myers earned his undergraduate degree from Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport, graduating from Louisiana State University Medical Center with honors. He completed his residency at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla., and completed a fellowship in advanced obstetrics at the University of Oklahoma Obstetrics and Gynecology Department where he then taught for seven years. Additionally, he has completed a Masters in Health Care Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr. Michelle Medina is the Associate Chief of Clinical Operations within Cleveland Clinic Community Health, overseeing practice operations and professional staff affairs across 3 primary care departments, Hospital Medicine, Medical Care at Home, Wellness, Functional Medicine and Center for Personalized Genomics. She graduated Cum Laude from the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, and completed her pediatric residency at Cleveland Clinic Children’s, serving as chief resident. She previously worked as medical director of a safety-net rural clinic in Alabama. In that position, she was an advocate for children and adolescents in the county foster care system, and was the primary pediatric medical home for most of the underserved county. Coming back to Cleveland, she has served the southeastern communities of Northeast Ohio from her practice in Independence and Broadview Heights. She has served in various leadership positions within the organization, among them as a clinical leader within the Quality Alliance (Cleveland Clinic’s clinically integrated network), and as the pediatric champion of population health. In 2017, she was appointed Department Chair of Primary Care Pediatrics, prior to her recent appointment.