J. Edward McEachern, MD

J. Edward McEachern, MD
Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, PacificSource

Dr. McEachern currently is the Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for PacificSource’s markets in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Montana. PacificSource is a physician-founded 86-year old not-for-profit health plan offering coverage in Medicare, Medicaid, and all commercial lines of business.  

A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. McEachern earned an undergraduate degree in biology at Emory University. As a Robert T. (Bobby) Jones Scholar at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland he earned a co-terminal master’s degree in biological systems theory and statistics. He went to Case Western Reserve University for Medical School, a Pathology residency at the University of California in San Francisco, a second residency in General Internal Medicine and Fellowship in Health Services Research at the Cleveland Clinic. He has practiced medicine in Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho

His academic career includes faculty positions at Vanderbilt’s center for Health Services, Emory University School of Medicine (Epidemiology and Biostatistics), Case Western Reserve University, and currently at the University of Utah where he is an associate professor of Orthopaedics in the School of medicine, and the Director of the Department’s Health Services Research program, and an Assistant Professor on faculty at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. 

His past experiences are broad and varied and have led to a uniquely rounded physician / administrator / entrepreneur:    

Prior to his work at PacificSource, he was the physician Executive Director and later the CMO/CMIO of the Saint Alphonsus Health Alliance, a network of over 1,677 physicians, 8 hospitals, 9 surgery centers, 24 urgent care centers, and $800,000,000 in annual net revenues. The Clinically integrated network serves over 120,000 at-risk lives, 500,000 annual ambulatory visits, 300,000 annual in-patient admits, and 562 locations in Western Idaho and Eastern Oregon.   

As the Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of the Northeast Ohio Community Health Plan in Cleveland, Ohio, the 1.6 million covered life managed care plan for Blue Shield and Blue Cross of Ohio, he developed innovative approaches to working with providers, payers, and patient / members to improve health, lower costs and demonstrate better health outcomes. He developed the first Medicaid HMO in the country there.  

At Daedalus Private Equity, Dr. McEachern was the physician senior partner for over ten years, and managed the firm’s strategic investments in hospitals, software and technology development firms, wholesale drug manufacturers, and re-insurers, and build and operated six academic hospitals 

His pioneering approaches to improving the service delivery and outcomes of clinical services are recognized across the United States and in other countries. As the director of Health Services Research and as an operator of hospitals, he continues to innovate through research that forges partnerships "across the continuum" of care to apply unorthodox but highly effective approaches to the design of health services and systems that provide superior value in terms of costs, outcomes, and satisfaction. His experience in operations, research, and consulting give him the opportunity to work with physicians, other clinicians, and managers in a variety of hospital and healthcare settings. In particular, he has successfully demonstrated the ability to engage collaborative multi-disciplinary teams in improving the quality of direct patient care.   

Dr. McEachern lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife, Dr. Harmony Schroeder, an OB/GYN, and their triplets, Bevan, William, and Jackson.  

As the Vice President for Medical Affairs at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, where he managed the operations of “all things clinical” as well as played a key operational role in the enterprise, controlling over half of the operational budget for the health system.  

Dr. McEachern built and ran a 2,800 practice, 8,500 physician MSO in 30 states with gross revenues of $80 million for the SunHealth alliance (now Premier) in Charlotte, NC.  

Dr. McEachern was Vice President for Medical Affairs at Hospital Corporation of America (HCA)'s West Paces Ferry Hospital in Atlanta, and quality improvement consultant for direct patient care to HCA's Corporate Office in Nashville, Tenn.

He was also a quality improvement consultant to the nation's first funded (by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) multi-center randomized clinical trial of clinical quality improvement methods. He is the author of four books and numerous articles on quality improvement and is on the editorial review board for Medical Care, The Health System Leader, and the ASQC Press. He has developed and taught courses for HCA, the Joint Commission, the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and, the University of Utah, Emory University as well as the Nordic School of Public Health.  

Dr. McEachern's consulting and research relate directly to issues in today's healthcare environment. While based at West Paces Ferry Hospital, he worked with the HCA Quality Resource Group to implement continuous quality improvement in direct patient care in any clinical environment. Sites included HCA-owned hospitals as well as Henry Ford Medical Center in Detroit, George Washington University Hospitals in Washington, D. C., and Lovelace Medical Center in Albuquerque. He set up and staffed a Corporate Health Services unit at West Paces Ferry Hospital, directly contracting with more than 20 corporate clients for health delivery (Including Delta Airlines, Lockheed, and NationsBank).

Dr. McEachern also developed clinical research corporations to study clinical quality improvement methodologies at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas, and West Paces Ferry. He implemented concurrent continuous improvement of patients' health care across organizations of providers and purchasers, managing costs and clinical outcomes. He participated with Gene Nelson, David Gustafson, Tom Nolan, and others in the development of valid and reliable outcomes measures of patient health status and patient evaluation of services. These measures are being piloted now in five chest pain teams nationwide. He also developed a tool to estimate the total costs of illness for purchasers of care.

Internationally, Dr. McEachern developed a universal model of direct patient care quality improvement for use in over 120 lesser-developed countries for the U. S. Agency for International Development. He designed and helped implement the Peace Corps' world-wide medical corps quality improvement plan, and provided consultation for the governments of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Zimbabwe in the design and redesign of their health care delivery systems.