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BackABIM Appoints Dr. Cary Sennett as Senior Vice President for Research
Philadelphia, PA, September 14, 2004 – The American Board of Internal Medicine announced the appointment of Cary Sennett, MD, PhD as Senior Vice President for Research and Development; the appointment will be effective October 4.
Christine Cassel, MD, President of the ABIM said, “Dr. Sennett has been a strong physician voice for quality throughout his career. What he brings to ABIM will help us continue to provide leadership in an area which is important to purchasers and patients alike.”
Dr. Sennett will lead the ABIM and the ABIM Foundation activities focused on efforts to link Certification and maintenance of certification with performance assessment and improvement. His focus will emphasize approaches to reduce redundancy and to enhance the relevance of assessment to the public and the physician community. “His wideranging experience brings key judgment and skills to our efforts,” observed Troyen A. Brennan, MD, JD, President of the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization and Chair of the ABIM Board of Directors.
Dr. Sennett has worked extensively with major health plans, including US Healthcare, Aetna and Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, and most recently with Ingenix, a UnitedHealth Group company that provides health intelligence to the industry. He served as Executive Vice President at the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), where he played a leadership role in the development of HEDIS™ and NCQA’s Quality Compass. In addition, at the American College of Cardiology he led the expansion of national programs to capture and use data about cardiovascular practice to advance professional efforts to improve the quality of health care.
“The public is demanding accountability from all those involved in health care. Responding to that demand appropriately requires evaluation systems that are rigorous and efficient,” said Dr. Sennett. He added, “ I look forward to building on to the solid platform that ABIM has established, to advance professional efforts to assure the quality of care in the United States.”
"Cary Sennett has been a visionary and leader with a relatively rare combination of medical training, and deep knowledge and experience in health care quality measurement and accountability,” commented Helen Darling, President of the National Business Group on Health. “He will add a lot to ABIM's impressive strategy to focus on documenting the critical role of the physician in the delivery of quality health care. Purchasers are very pleased that ABIM has taken on this leadership role to actively support quality improvement and reward for excellence."
Dr. Sennett is certified in internal medicine. He received a BS with distinction from Stanford University, an MD from Yale University School of Medicine, and a PhD in health policy and management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed residency training in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and served as chief resident in medicine for the Harvard Community Health Plan Hospital.
About ABIM
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) is an independent, not-for-profit organization that grants board certification—a well accepted marker of physician quality—to internists and subspecialists. Certification is a rigorous, comprehensive program for evaluating physician knowledge, skills and attitudes to assure both patients and payers that a physician has achieved competence for practice in a given field. Individual physician certification results may be found at www.abim.org.
