Thomas Tracy, Jr., MD was placed as the chief medical officer at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a 551-bed medical center served by over 1,100 physicians and other providers. In partnership with the Penn State College of Medicine, the medical center is recognized as one of the nation’s premier academic health centers. In his role, Dr. Tracy is responsible for coordinating, developing, and implementing the effective and efficient management of clinical resources in the delivery of inpatient and outpatient care. He engages with operational and clinical colleagues to improve care guidelines, quality, and standardization to help drive down the cost of care, while improving UHC and other quality benchmarks. Dr. Tracy leads the identification and prioritization of opportunities to improve the quality and efficiency of care, and then implements systems to demonstrate improvement in these, in addition to supervising the organization’s efforts to comply with external clinical accrediting agencies.
Dr. Tracy is an accomplished clinician, researcher, and administrative leader who brings to the position significant clinical programmatic development experience, as well as experience navigating complex environments, developing relationships, and recruiting physicians.
Before joining Penn State Hershey, Dr. Tracy spent almost two decades with the Lifespan system and Brown University in Rhode Island. He joined Rhode Island Hospital in 1997 as the surgeon-in-chief for the newly-formed Hasbro Children’s Hospital, where he expanded integrated specialty pediatric surgical care, and developed system-wide, hospital-focused programmatic strategic planning, funding, and implementation that led to both growth and national recognition. In 2003, Dr. Tracy also became the vice chairman of the Department of Surgery at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, with responsibility for all major recruitment, retention, and staffing plans for faculty across seven specialties and nine divisions, and for the academic development of over 270 faculty and divisional leaders, also serving as the director of the pediatric surgery residency program. Dr. Tracy led multiple clinical and basic science research platforms and NIH study sections, as well as the pediatric research institute, and served as the co-director of the Surgical Executive Committee, which was recognized for best practices and achieved significant operational savings in inventory control. In 2012, in addition to retaining his two existing roles, Dr. Tracy became the senior vice president and chief medical officer of Miriam Hospital and the interim SVP and CMO of Rhode Island Hospital. In this capacity, he was responsible for Graduate Medical Education, and successfully engaged all chairpersons and chiefs in revenue and market share planning. He achieved major care delivery changes in cardiology and cardiac surgery, reaching approval for the first system-based Cardiovascular Institute Council, and dramatically improved patient flow and decreased length of stay utilizing Six Sigma and Lean tools.
Dr. Tracy earned his bachelor’s degree in natural sciences at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York; his master’s degree in anatomy at Albany Medical College of Union University in Albany, New York; and his MD from The Sackler School of Medicine New York State/American Program of Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. He has held leadership roles with the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education, the American Board of Surgery, the American College of Surgeons, the American Pediatric Surgical Association, and the New England Surgical Society.
QLK’s Zack Reynolds led the search to recruit Dr. Tracy to Penn State Hershey, where he has been in place since August 15, 2016.
