Joseph Drozda, MD, FACC
Mercy Health
St. Louis, MO
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Dr. Drozda is a cardiologist and Director of Outcomes Research at Mercy Health—a 4 state regional health system headquartered in St. Louis. He served on the American College of Cardiology’s Board of Trustees for 5 years, is a past chair of the ACC’s Clinical Quality Committee, and for 10 years was the ACC representative to the National Quality Forum where he chaired the Health Professionals Council. He is an emeritus member of the ACC’s National Cardiovascular Data Registry Management Board. Dr. Drozda is a recipient of the ACC Presidential Citation and has been designated a Master of the College. He was a methodologist for the American Medical Association-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) for over 14 years, chaired the PCPI Measures Advisory Committee, and was on the inaugural board of the new PCPI Foundation. Dr. Drozda was in private practice for over 18 years and has 24 years of experience in managed care including stints as Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President of Health Plan Operations at Centene—a publicly traded Medicaid managed care company. From 1996 to 1999 he served as Vice President of Medical Management for SSM Health Care-St. Louis participating in that system’s journey to becoming the first healthcare organization to receive the Malcolm Baldrige award.
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Dr. Drozda has been involved in clinical trials for over 20 years. The current emphasis of his research at Mercy is on the safety and effectiveness of medical devices. He was principal investigator of an FDA Medical Device Epidemiology Network demonstration in which prototype unique device identifiers were implemented in Mercy’s electronic information systems enabling creation of a database for purposes of safety surveillance and research. He is a member of the Research and Development Team of the Healthcare Transformation Group—a device-focused alliance of Geisinger, Intermountain, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo, and Mercy and served on the FDA’s National Medical Device Surveillance System Planning Board. He is the principal investigator of BUILD, a major initiative funded by industry and FDA that will extend the Mercy UDI work to Geisinger and Intermountain Healthcare. He also serves on the Expert Advisory Council of SCAN Health—a Canadian government funded initiative focused on promoting medical device tracking and tracing for purposes of patient safety and effectiveness evaluation. Dr. Drozda has published and presented in multiple venues on the development and implementation of new systems for performing postmarket medical device surveillance and research.