Speaker: Walter (Buzz) Stewart, PhD, MPH, Former Chief Research Officer, Sutter Health

Date: Thursday, April 19, 2018

Time: 03:00pm – 04:15pm

Location:  Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Room 2443

Abstract: By driving the digitization of healthcare data, the 2009 HITECH Act set the stage for business and business practice transformation. Today, the amount of healthcare data doubles every two years and growth is accelerating.   It is now widely accepted that the future of healthcare will strongly depend on the effective and maximal use of the growing diversity and volume of healthcare data to transform care in ways that substantially improve patient accessibility, quality, and affordability of care and patient and provider experience. 

But, achieving that vision – transforming healthcare through the continual creation of analytical insights and their translation into clinical practice – is exceedingly difficult in the complex business of health care because it requires diverse knowledge, talent, assets, and endless financial investment. No single entity or market has all that is required. Today, these capabilities and assets rest within distinctly different organizations that largely act independently of each other.  In this talk I will describe an organizational model that bridges the divides among organizations to accelerate transformation of health care through data driven science, methods, and solutions.

Bio: Buzz Stewart, Chief Research Officer, joined Sutter Health in July 2012. He oversees research organized around Digital Health and Advanced Analytics, Precision Care & Medicine, Clinical Trials, and Rapid Health System Learning. Buzz has transformed the research model at Sutter to be translation focused and strategic in supporting Sutter as a Learning Health Care System. His personal interests span the unique role of health system research in transforming care through predictive analytics, population health management, and digital health.

Prior to Sutter, Buzz founded the Geisinger Center for Health Research (2003-2012), a research and development unit that participated in Geisinger’s decade long strategy to transform the delivery of health care.  Previously, he was a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (1983-1995), was Vice President of Research and Development at AdvancePCS (1998-2002) and founded several successful start-ups. 

He has published about 400 peer-reviewed articles (Google Scholar h-index>110) and book chapters after receiving his PhD in Epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University, his MPH from UCLA, and his BS in Psychobiology from University of California, Riverside.