New England has a special pull for Glenn Pomerantz, MD, JD, Point32Health’s new Chief Medical Officer. He grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, and opened his first practice there in a two-family house, converting the kitchen into an office and the living room into a waiting room. After serving the community for several years, he embarked on a career in the health plan industry that took him throughout the Northeast and Midwest; he and his wife still held on to their Sharon home.
“I love this part of the world. I think it’s a magical place,” explains Dr. Pomerantz. “For me it’s home. To be able to contribute where I was nurtured and supported through my early school days and where I opened my internal medicine practice is a special opportunity.”
A perfect complement to Point32Health’s commitment to community-based care, Dr. Pomerantz was named chief medical officer at Point32Health on Aug. 25, 2023, and in this role, he is responsible for leading and advancing the organization’s clinical capabilities. He oversees clinical innovation, quality and accreditation, medical policy, and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, which includes the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Pomerantz sees his work with the Point32Health provider network as a natural extension of his days being in practice and his extensive experience in the health plan industry.
“When a patient asks a doctor, nurse, or office manager ‘Which plan should I choose?’ my goal is that only one answer comes to mind: a Point32Health plan. That our provider network feels that there’s a fair, collaborative partnership between them and Point32Health — that we respect what they do, we look at emerging problems in their practice and support them in improving patient outcomes, and that if there’s an issue, we are a partner they can depend on to work together with them to try to address it,” Dr. Pomerantz explains.
Dr. Pomerantz comes to Point32Health from C2i Genomics, a company that offers a whole genome cancer intelligence treatment platform. As chief medical officer at C2i, Dr. Pomerantz led the development of more than 30 clinical trials and oversaw operations for the company’s European Union laboratory business and product development.
Prior to his role at C2i Genomics, Dr. Pomerantz had extensive experience in the health plan industry, most recently serving as senior vice president of health services at Gateway Health in Pittsburgh where his responsibilities included oversight for network management, medical management, pharmacy, clinical innovation, and quality. In this role, he designed and successfully deployed three innovation projects to align with the state’s priorities — increasing access to rural care and convening community-based resources addressing social determinants of health (SDOH).
He has also served as chief medical officer at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, and as national medical director at Aetna and Cigna. His accomplishments have included rebuilding medical management programs and redesigning departmental structure and processes to drive productivity improvements and enhance the capacity of key utilization management and medical policy teams, as well as leading the transition of members into value-based reimbursement models with strategic hospital partners that lowered total cost of care while improving outcomes.
In those roles and in his work now at Point32Health, Dr. Pomerantz believes that having a clear understanding of the needs and challenges of the provider network underpins opportunities for innovation.
“A successful health plan has to see the world through the eyes of a hospital administrator, a nurse, a physician, an office manager, a clinician,” says Dr. Pomerantz. “When you do that, it makes you appreciate information very differently and it allows you to create a collaboration that propels care and innovation forward.”
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