Q&A with Dr. Patrick Ramsey, TCHMB Chief Medical Officer

In September of last year, Dr. Patrick Ramsey stepped down from his position as Vice Chair/Chair Elect of the TCHMB Executive Committee in order to serve in a staff role as TCHMB’s first ever Chief Medical Officer. It was a milestone for TCHMB, which launched in 2013 with strong leadership at the Executive Committee level but no one in the CMO role that has been so instrumental to the success of many of the nation’s more established perinatal quality collaboratives.

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“Pat was an obvious choice,” says Dr. David Lakey, who helped launch TCHMB when he was Texas state health commissioner and now serves as a member of the Executive Committee. “He has a strong background in both research and quality improvement. He’s been with TCHMB for years, and he was already in a leadership role. And he has the vision and commitment to help take the Collaborative to the next level.”

In addition to his role as CMO, Ramsey is a Professor and Division Chief for Maternal-Fetal Medicine at UT Health San Antonio. He is an active member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and the Infectious Disease Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology, among other organizations. And he is an active researcher and educator, with numerous awards and accolades and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in major journals. His research interests are clinical trials, prevention of preterm birth, reduction of maternal morbidity and mortality, and management of medical complications of pregnancy.

We spoke to Ramsey about his background, his path to the TCHMB, and his vision for its future.

From where do you hail and how did you end up in Texas?

I’m from Wisconsin originally.  I came here with my wife in 2009. She was a military Ob-Gyn and was assigned to a base in San Antonio. I went to a high-risk pregnancy practice, and then moved over to UT Health San Antonio.

What brought you to TCHMB?

I received an email through the Perinatal Advisory Council that there was an opening. At the time, I didn’t know a lot about TCHMB other than that it was the state perinatal quality collaborative. I knew that the California PQC had done a lot of amazing work, and thought it would be exciting to be involved at the ground level with something that could potentially become very important.

When did you get the QI bug?

I’ve always been interested, as a physician, in evidence-based practice, and in translating research into clinical practice. A lot of my past research has focused on how to prevent women from having a pre-term or recurrent pre-term delivery, and in how to optimize outcomes in women who do deliver preterm. That very naturally led to getting involved with quality improvement work at UT Health San Antonio. That in turn is what led me to the Data Committee on TCHMB.

Your position, Chief Medical Officer, is a new one for the Collaborative. Can you talk about that?

Many of us in the upper leadership of TCHMB came to the realization that the way we were doing things was not sustainable. If we wanted to have the same kind of impact that some of the other PQCs around the country have had, we needed to have a medical leader who could dedicate him or herself more fully to expanding the footprint and visibility of these initiatives. We couldn’t just depend on voluntary service, though that still plays a big role in the operations of the Collaborative. So we created the chief medical officer position.

That was a critical step to making sure we had a bigger impact in the state, and over time more visibility nationally. The even more critical change has been the integration with the RAC-PCR Alliance, which is the implementation arm on the ground. That merger really kicks us up in terms of the level of impact we can have.

Why is the merger so important?

For so many reasons. The RACs and PCRs are the conduit to the hospitals. They are the hospitals. Merging with them is what is going to allow us to implement QI initiatives at a truly state-wide level, which will allow us over time to have a measurable impact on outcomes for mothers and babies. At the same time, TCHMB as an entity has capacities they don’t, in terms of providing QI training, ongoing coordination of initiatives, and coordination of a diverse array of stakeholders from across the state. We have the same goal, but we have different strengths to bring to the table. We need to work together, and now we are.