Chairman of the Board Letter - Home Centered Care Institute

March 2, 2020
Chairman of the Board Letter

Thomas Cornwell, MD, Transitions Roles at HCCI and Joins VillageMD

On behalf of the Board of Directors, leaders and staff at the Home Centered Care Institute (HCCI), I wanted to share some exciting news with you. Dr. Thomas Cornwell, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of HCCI, will begin a new role as Senior Medical Director of Village Medical at Home, part of VillageMD, effective March 9, 2020. In this position, he will bring his experience, skills and passion from making over 33,000 house calls to VillageMD’s extensive provider network that serves over 500,000 patients in nine markets. With this change, Dr. Cornwell will no longer be HCCI’s CEO, but he will maintain a strong connection to the organization in his new role as Executive Chairman.

Dr. Cornwell has been providing home-based primary care (HBPC) for over twenty-five years, starting at a time when house calls were relatively rare. Well, they are most assuredly not as rare now – in part due to his vision, HCCI’s efforts, and as also evidenced by VillageMD’s expansion into the field. His original vision, supported by our funders, led to establishing HCCI, where he and a similarly passionate team have made great strides towards increasing access to HBPC by:

• Generating substantial public and provider awareness of the importance of HBPC and the need for expanding the workforce.
• Playing a role in the continuation of the Independence at Home Medicare Demonstration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ two New Payment Models: Primary Care First and Direct Contracting.
• Educating over 500 unique learners and 260 HBPC practices through live workshops, pre-conferences, online courses, webinars and additional events and resources.
• Introducing a consulting practice that supports new and existing HBPC programs through a focus on practice management and clinical care.
• Creating six HCCI Centers of Excellence for Home-Based Primary Care™ with prominent national academic healthcare institutions and assembling a national faculty of HBPC leaders.
• Teaching over 1,000 students and health system leaders at three medical universities in China and partnering with Shandong University in Jinan to create an HCCI HBPC training center.

I am excited about this change for two main reasons First, this new role will allow Dr. Cornwell to leverage his clinical experience and skills to an even greater extent while continuing to support HCCI and its mission to spread HBPC nationally. Second, I know HCCI has the people, infrastructure and partners in place to continue its excellent training and consulting, advocacy work, research, and focus on increasing public awareness, now and into the future.

In terms of roles, as Executive Chairman, Dr. Cornwell will be a member of the board; continue to act as a strategist; represent HCCI to the public, industry and media; and play a continued role in the organization’s ongoing growth and improvement, including fundraising. Our board will also review the existing leadership structure at our next meeting in March. In the interim, Julie Sacks, Chief Operating Officer, will continue to manage the daily operations of the organization ─ to include overseeing the senior leadership team and creating and ensuring the execution of the organization’s high-level strategies, new initiatives, and partnerships.

Due to his new role, Dr. Cornwell will no longer practice at Northwestern Medicine HomeCare Physicians. Dr. Cornwell remains forever thankful for the role Northwestern Medicine played in supporting him and HomeCare Physicians. Dr. Paul Chiang will continue to lead HomeCare Physicians and remain Senior Medical and Practice Advisor at HCCI.

The entire board wishes to thank Dr. Cornwell for his tremendous contributions and leadership as the CEO and is pleased to be able to continue to work with him in his new Executive Chairman role.  Also, we want to congratulate him on joining VillageMD, a wonderful opportunity that further spotlights the increasing visibility of HBPC.

Finally, I personally want to thank Dr. Cornwell, or “Tom” as I call him, for his friendship and for everything he’s done to make house calls a valued and visible part of the healthcare landscape.  Because, in the end, it’s all about taking care of a patient in their home ─ something I’m sure we all hope is available when we, and our loved ones, need it.

Read the VillageMD press release here.

Read the HCCI Chairman of the Board letter here.

Sincerely,
Richard Maybury
Chairman of the Board
Home Centered Care Institute