Agrawal Leaving National Quality Forum for Anthem
Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., is leaving his position as president CEO of the National Quality Forum (NQF) to become chief health officer at Anthem Inc., the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.
Agrawal will oversee Anthem’s enterprise health strategy, including medical policy and clinical quality, as well as the company’s work to address the social drivers of health. He will also lead Anthem’s community health strategy and the Anthem Foundation.
Agrawal’s tenure at the helm of NQF began January 2017 and the organization credits him with leading modernization of measure endorsement and expanding focus on achieving health equity. During his tenure at NQF, the organization’s leadership role within the healthcare ecosystem has grown through convenings such as the Hospital Quality Star Rating Summit and the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) Payment Summit, the nonprofit organization said. He has further worked toward successfully reducing measure endorsement time from 20 to seven months.
Previously, he served as deputy administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), where he led an effort to improve the physician experience with Medicare and was also was one of the main architects of CMS’s strategy to address the national opioid epidemic. He also served as director of the Center for Program Integrity (CPI), where he was instrumental in launching new initiatives in data transparency and analytics, utilization management and payment models.
"Dr. Agrawal’s extensive experience in both the public and private sectors will further accelerate Anthem’s efforts around ‘whole person care’ in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs for all those we serve," said Gail Boudreaux, president and CEO of Anthem, in a statement. "He is a transformative thought leader, and I am excited to welcome him to Anthem."
Agrawal serves on the board of the Grameen Foundation and the Presidential Advisory Council of Brown University’s School of Public Health. He is also Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine.
The NQF said Chris Queram has been appointed as interim CEO and will assume office on Jan. 4, 2021 as NQF begins a nationwide search to find a successor. Queram has served as president and CEO of the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) since November 2005. An NQF Member, WCHQ is a voluntary consortium of organizations learning and working together to improve health and make healthcare better and more affordable for the people of Wisconsin.
