Ron Paulus

Ronald A. Paulus, MD, is President and CEO of Mission Health, a $2 billion integrated health system serving all of western North Carolina -- a region older, poorer, sicker and less likely to be insured than state and national averages. Mission Health includes: six general acute care hospitals (including four Critical Access Hospitals), a rehabilitation hospital, more than five hundred employed providers, inpatient and home hospice programs, a PACE program and an MSSP Accountable Care Organization comprised of more than 1,000 physicians in a region-wide clinically-integrated network.

During his tenure, Mission Health has reduced inpatient mortality by more than half, achieved six-sigma medication safety results, improved patient experience to above the 90th percentile, doubled employee engagement scores to more than twice the national average and became the only health system ever designated as one of the nation’s Top 15 Health Systems for six of seven six years (IBM Watson Health, 2012-2018) performing in the top 2% of the United States in the most recent award period. Mission Health closed a transformative transaction with HCA Healthcare on February 1, 2019 creating the largest per capita Foundation in America. The new Dogwood Health Trust will be dedicated to impacting the social determinants of health to dramatically improve the health and wellbeing of all peoples and communities in western North Carolina.

Before joining Mission Health, Dr. Paulus was Executive Vice President, Clinical Operations and Chief Innovation Officer for Geisinger Health System, where he managed Geisinger’s hospitals and its more than 800 physician member group practice and also was responsible for ensuring system-wide innovation. Prior to joining Geisinger, Dr. Paulus was co-founder, President and later CEO of CareScience, Inc. (a NASDAQ company), later acquired by Premier, Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC;) providing an analytics platform to support health systems’ quality and efficiency improv

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