John Birkmeyer, M.D., is Chief Clinical Officer at Sound Physicians, a national physician practice specializing in acute care medicine and performance management. It comprises almost 4,000 physicians and advanced practitioners at over 300 hospitals nationwide. In this role, he is responsible for driving clinical and financial performance in care delivery and success under value-based payment models. Before joining Sound, he was Executive Vice President of Integrated Delivery Systems and Chief Academic Officer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health.
A graduate of Boston College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Birkmeyer completed his general surgery residency and medical informatics fellowship at Dartmouth. He joined its faculty in 1996 and was subsequently appointed Chief of General Surgery. In 2004, he moved to University of Michigan, where he served as Director of the Center for Healthcare Outcomes & Policy and founding Director of the Michigan Value Collaborative, a payer-funded improvement collaborative involving over 50 hospitals across the state. In 2011 he founded ArborMetrix, an analytics company focused on helping hospitals and providers succeed under new payment models.
An elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly Institute of Medicine), Dr. Birkmeyer is an internationally-recognized health services researcher. His research has focused on understanding variation in hospital and provider performance, scalable strategies for improvement, and value-based reimbursement. Continuously funded by the NIH since 1999, he has authored almost 300 peer-reviewed studies, which have appeared regularly in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs.