Telehealth News

A Familiar Face Returns to Lead the American Telemedicine Association

Joe Kvedar, a digital health expert and the driving force behind Partners HealthCare's connected health strategies, will become the American Telemedicine Association's new president in 2020.

Source: ThinkStock

By Eric Wicklund

- A familiar face is returning to lead the American Telemedicine Association.

The organization announced this week that Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, Vice President of Connected Health at Boston-based Partners HealthCare and a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School, will become its president at next year’s annual meeting and exhibition in Phoenix.

Kvedar is a big name in the digital health space, having run Partners’ Center for Connected Health and been the face of the Connected Health Symposium for many years before the annual fall event was acquired by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He now works with the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHA) and HIMSS to produce the Connected Health Conference.

An author and blogger, he served as ATA president in 2004-05 and served on the ATA’s Board of Directors from 2002-06.

Kvedar’s return comes at an important time for the ATA, which is looking to stake new ground in an ever-shifting connected health landscape since a management turnover in 2017.

“If you look at the vision and focus of the ATA – accelerating telehealth adoption and engagement by both consumers and providers – then Joe was really the clear choice,” says Ann Mond Johnson, the ATA’s Chief Executive Officer, who came on board in early 2018 and has been pushing to raise the organization’s profile. “Based on his experience and leadership at Partners HealthCare, he has a proven track record in leveraging telehealth to reimagine care delivery, which is an imperative for our industry.”

“Joe also embraces our broader definition of telehealth to include both synchronous and asynchronous communication,” she added. “Consequently, he has committed to engage, convene and collaborate with a range of stakeholders, something the ATA must do to expand its influence in the industry while ensuring that people get access to care where and when they need it.”

Kvedar will succeed John Glaser, PhD, Executive Senior Advisor at Cerner, who took over as president at the ATA conference this past May in New Orleans. Glaser, a former president of HIMSS and chairman of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), had succeeded Andrew Watson, MD, MLitt, FACS, UPMC’s Medical Director of Telemedicine and Vice President of Clinical Information Technology Transformation.

"ATA has a renewed approach and a clear vision, to integrate virtual care into emerging value-based delivery models, focusing on the whole patient and collaboration between care settings,” Kvedar said in a press release issued by the ATA. “Telehealth offerings perfectly align with these new models, extending capacity and access to personalized, quality care, where and when the patient needs it.”

"I welcome the opportunity to beat the drum on telehealth adoption and look forward to working with the ATA board and our members, partners and other industry leaders, to create the right market conditions, increase awareness and support necessary policy and reimbursement guidelines to accelerate telehealth adoption over the next three to five years," he added.

The author of two books, The New Mobile Age: How Technology Will Extend the Healthspan and Optimize the Lifespan (2017) and The Internet of Healthy Things (2015), and more than 1,000 publications, Kvedar currently serves on the Editorial Board of npj Digital Medicine, a Nature Research journal, and is co-chair of the American Medical Association's Digital Medicine Payment Advisory Group and a member of the Board of Xcertia, an mHealth app evaluation and certification resource launched in 2016 by HIMSS, the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association.

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