Greg Pawlson , M.D., M.P.H., became Executive Vice President of National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) on January 1, 2000 . NCQA is a leading evaluator of health care services and is especially well known for its development of HEDIS® clinical performance measures. At NCQA, beyond his role as a senior member of the leadership team at NCQA, Dr. Pawlson has oversight and responsibility for research and analysis, federal and state contracting, performance measure development and corporate/foundation relationships. While at NCQA, Dr. Pawlson has played a major role in all phases of the development and maintenance of the current set of HEDIS® measures and other NCQA measures including those used in physician recognition programs and pay for performance projects.

Before joining NCQA in January 2000, Dr. Pawlson was Senior Associate Vice President for Health Affairs and Medical Director for Quality and Utilization Management for the Faculty Practice at the George Washington University Medical Center . Prior becoming Senior Associate VP, Dr. Pawlson had served at GW as Chairman of the Department of Health Care Sciences (DHCS) and Director of the Institute for Health Policy, Outcomes and Human Values at GW. DHCS was a unique interdisciplinary department that served as the academic and practice home for he GW University Health Plan (HMO), and for clinical, research and educational programs in primary care internal medicine and pediatrics, family practice, geriatrics, nurse practitioner, physician assistant and physical therapy programs. The Department was the locus of the creation of a number of programs in public health, which served as the basis for the creation of a School of Public Health and Health Services at GW in 1996. While at GW, Dr. Pawlson held academic titles included that of the Murdoch Head Chair of Preventive Medicine and Professor of Health Care Sciences (HCS) and of Medicine in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and of Health Services Management and Policy in the School of Public Health and Health Services.

Dr. Pawlson received his undergraduate degree from Penn State , his MD from the University of Pittsburgh and did his internship/residency at Stanford. He was then a staff associate of the National Institutes of Health, and later an Endocrine fellow and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Washington . During that time Dr. Pawlson completed a MPH degree with a focus on health systems and management, and did several studies involving systems at Group Health Puget Sound. His clinical expertise is in the area of geriatrics and prior coming to NCQA he served as clinical chief of geriatrics at the George Washington University Hospital and faculty practice, and as medical director for several nursing homes in Washington D.C.
During a sabbatical year at GW in 1987, Dr. Pawlson served as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and health policy aide on the staff of Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine). Among the legislative programs that Dr. Pawlson worked on during this time were the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Bill (primarily the drug benefit) and OBRA-87 (nursing home reform). During a second sabbatical year in 1997-98, Dr. Pawlson was a scholar in residence at the American Association of Medical Colleges, in the AAMC’s Center for the Assessment and Management of Change in Academic Medicine. During this time he worked with Dr. Paul Griner, a Senior VP of the AAMC, on research projects related to the adaptation of academic medical centers to changing markets as well as on a new index of the intensity of competition fostered by managed care in large metropolitan areas.

Within organized medicine Dr. Pawlson served as Chairman of the Public Policy Committee, and later as President and Chairman of the Board of the American Geriatrics Society. He also served as a member of the National Council of the Society for General Internal Medicine and as the Chairman of the Council of Department Chairs of the Society of Teachers of Preventive Medicine. Dr. Pawlson has been on the Board of Directors of several national organizations including the Bon Secours Hospital System and the United States Soldier’s and Airman’s Home, and was the associate director of the national program “Partnerships for Quality Education” funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, He also served as a member of the IOM Committee on “Identifying Priority Areas for Quality Improvement” and is current on the subcommittee for Performance Measurement of the American College of Physicians, a member of the operations oversight group of the Alliance for Quality Improvement in Diabetes, the Steering committee of the Cancer Care Measurement project at NQF and a liaison member of the AMA-Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement.

Dr. Pawlson has also had an active research presence in policy and health services research with a focus early in his career on health professions education, health policy and health care financing of the care of older persons and more recently on quality measurement, improvement, evaluation and reporting. His research at NCQA has included projects related to the development and testing of performance measures, including a set of measures of the presence and function of systems in ambulatory care practice, issues related to the HOS and CAHPS survey, and the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness in health care. He has over 100 publications in books, proceedings, and peer-reviewed journals and has served on the editorial board of numerous publications and on review panels for various foundations and agencies including RWJ, AARP, HRSA, AHCPR and NIH. He currently serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Managed Care, the American Journal of Medical Quality and is a board member of the American Board of Medical Quality.