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Former Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove Joins Health IT Company's Board

Analysis  |  By Philip Betbeze  
   June 15, 2018

The company's main product provides prescription decision support to clinicians.

Former Cleveland Clinic CEO Delos M. "Toby" Cosgrove has joined the board of a Denver-based healthcare IT company that offers prescription decision support to providers.

RxRevu says its mission is to improve healthcare through more informed and consistent prescription decisions.

Cosgrove will join a board chaired by Explorys co-founder and CEO Stephen McHale, who sold that company to IBM in 2015.

Old Friends

Explorys was a healthcare intelligence cloud company that built its business on analyzing clinical data sets that it built to help hospitals and health systems deliver better, more cost-effective care. It was founded at Cleveland Clinic and spun off from the Clinic in 2009.  

Interestingly, IBM Watson Health, which absorbed Explorys, nearly simultaneously announced a major shift in strategy in scaling back its hospital business, citing weak demand.

Cosgrove famously turned down offers from two presidents to lead the Veterans Administration prior to retirement, and was the single healthcare voice in President Trump's advisory panel, assembled in the early days of his administration.

That panel quickly disbanded in the wake of the President's comments about the Charlottesville violence in the summer of last year.

Supporting Prescription Efficiency

RxRevu's decision support tool, SwiftRx, incorporates national guidelines and patient cost variables to systemize prescribing and improve quality and lower costs for patients, as well as improve provider efficiency, Cosgrove said, in a release.

The tool is "one of the essential solutions health systems will need as they move into value-based care, improve quality and lower costs for their patients, as well as help to prevent provider burnout," Cosgrove said. "This is the future of medicine."

The former heart surgeon retired from the Clinic in January after leading the organization since 2004 and having worked for the Clinic since 1975.

"Dr. Cosgrove is a visionary clinical leader and his unique perspective will help us to better collaborate and partner with health systems,” said Carm Huntress, co-founder and CEO of RxRevu, in the release.

 

Philip Betbeze is the senior leadership editor at HealthLeaders.


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