Annual Health Value Awards

Our first inductee is Tom Emerick, a leading expert in health benefit design, global healthcare challenges, health care economics, evidence-based medicine, and process improvement. Tom spent 15 years at Walmart designing and managing benefits for over 1.6 million employees. He has held positions with Burger King, British Petroleum and American Fidelity Assurance Company. Among his most important contributions is the concept of Centers of Excellence for steering patients to the highest quality and most cost-effective sites and physicians for their condition. At Walmart, he met directly with founder Sam Walton.

The Centers of Excellence (COE) program he developed started with well-known national health care providers like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic. It then evolved to include lesser-known clinics that agreed to follow those key Centers of Excellence guidelines.  The model also included careful direct contracting with the provider to reduce unnecessary procedures and limited the COE designation to specific diagnoses for specific centers at a specific bundled price, rather than a blanket endorsement of the entire facility with no bundled price.