CMS Leadership

Patrick Conway, MD, MSc, is Chief Medical Officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality. This office is responsible for all quality measures for CMS, value-based purchasing programs, quality improvement programs in all 50 states, clinical standards and survey and certification of Medicare and Medicaid health care providers across the nation, and all Medicare coverage decisions for treatments and services. The office budget exceeds $1.5 billion annually and is a major force for quality and transformation across Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the U.S. health care system. Previously, he was Director of Hospital Medicine and an Associate Professor at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. He was also AVP Outcomes Performance, responsible for leading measurement, including the electronic health record measures, and facilitating improvement of health outcomes across the health care system. Previously, he was Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. In 2007-08, he was a White House Fellow assigned to the Office of Secretary in HHS and the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. As Chief Medical Officer, he had a portfolio of work focused primarily on quality measurement and links to payment, health information technology, and policy, research, and evaluation across the entire Department. He also served as Executive Director of the Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research coordinating the investment of the $1.1 billion for CER in the Recovery Act. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and completed a Master's of Science focused on health services research and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Previously, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, serving senior management of mainly health care clients on strategy projects. He has published articles in journals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and Pediatrics and given national presentations on topics including health care policy, quality of care, comparative effectiveness, hospitalist systems, and nurse staffing. He is a practicing pediatric hospitalist, completed pediatrics residency at Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital Boston, and graduated with High Honors from Baylor College of Medicine. He is married with three children.

Deputy Director: Wesley Perich

Deputy Chief Medical Officer: Shari M. Ling, MD