Cary Sennett

Dr. Sennett is senior vice president for research and development at the American Board of Medicine. Prior to that, he led research and development at Ingenix, a UnitedHealth Group company that provides health intelligence to firms in all sectors of health care. Before joining Ingenix, Dr. Sennett was vice president for science and quality improvement at the American College of Cardiology (ACC), executive vice president for health information services at BenefitNation, a provider of internet applications in the health care industry, and executive vice president at the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). He also spent five years as a quality leader at Aetna, at US Healthcare, and at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. Dr. Sennett is a board-certified internist with considerable experience using performance data to support marketplace efforts to improve the quality of care. His group developed the methods that US Healthcare used to pay hospitals for performance, nearly 10 years ago. At NCQA, he played a central role in establishing HEDIS as the national standard for measuring the performance of health plans, and in developing mechanisms (report cards, Quality Compass) to make information available to support consumer and purchaser choice. While at ACC, he led the expansion of the College's National Cardiovascular Registry (NCDR), and its application to new areas (such as managed care). Dr Sennett received his M.D. from Yale and did his residency training at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. After his clinical training, he completed a Kaiser Foundation Fellowship in Health Policy and Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received his Ph.D. Dr. Sennett is a frequent speaker and author on issues of quality improvement in health care. He has been a member of the editorial boards of the Joint Commission Journal on Quality Improvement, Quality Management in Health Care, the American Journal of Managed Care, and served as founding editor-in-chief of Preventive Medicine in Managed Care. He served as co-chair of the Steering Committee on Hospital Measurement for the National Quality Forum (NQF), and currently serves as the chair of NQF's Technical Advisory Panel on Cardiovascular Ambulatory Care measures.