Marc T. Edwards photo

Biographical Sketch

Marc Edwards brings more than 20 years of broadly-based healthcare management and consulting experience to help clients improve quality, profitability and resource use.  Once a chair of Family Medicine in a multi-specialty group practice, he has since served as the senior physician executive in both community and university teaching hospitals. He donates significant professional time to management research on important but neglected topics. He is a thought leader in the domain of clinical peer review process. He has conducted 2 national studies and published 5 scientific manuscripts on the subject.

He initially came to the consulting field through work with Ernst & Young’s Healthcare practice in the late 90’s.  When E & Y divested that practice, he founded his own firm to develop practical products and services to serve neglected areas of medical management.  He brings expertise in group facilitation, performance improvement program development, patient-related process redesign, metrics, data analysis and display, and medical cost control.

Over the past 3 years, he has leveraged his experience with clinical peer review process improvement to fill the vacuum of management research in this field. He conceived and orchestrated the first-ever national survey of peer review practices.  He subsequently translated the results into a practical, Clinical Peer Review Program Self-Evaluation Tool. In 2009, with support from the ACPE, he conducted a follow up study to validate the Self-Evaluation Tool and to correlate peer review practices with objective hospital quality and safety data. Through these research initiatives, he was able to characterize and elaborate an evidence-based approach for conducting clinical peer review within a quality improvement framework - the QI Model. To further advance this work, he has launched the Longitudinal Clinical Peer Review Effectiveness Study. He is also organizing an Ideal Clinical Peer Review Practices Collaborative and a Normative Peer Review Database Project.

A native of Seattle, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  He earned his MD degree from the University of Colorado, trained in Family Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and later completed the Executive MBA program at the University of Connecticut.  He maintains board certification in Family Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians.