Michael Pine, MD., MBA., is manager of MJP Healthcare Innovations, for which he has invented a computerized comprehensive analytic infrastructure to reform healthcare payment. He currently leads MJP’s developmental team in constructing a prototype “Patient-Centered Virtual Health Maintenance Organization (HMO)” to demonstrate the invention’s unique features and capabilities.Dr. Pine’s prior innovations in measuring and improving the cost-effectiveness of clinical care span three decades. He founded Michael Pine and Associates (MPA), a developmental consulting firm, in 1988. As its president, he assisted scores of healthcare organizations, clinicians, third-party payers, consumer advocates, and others across the nation to obtain and interpret data on clinical quality and efficiency, and to utilize the findings in making clinical and managerial decisions. Dr. Pine’s innovations include methods: to measure adverse outcomes that is more objective than providers’ voluntary reports; to calculate risk-adjusted routine costs of hospitalization and excess costs of hospital-acquired complications; and to evaluate cost and quality using average standardized results achieved by cost-effective providers. He was a leader in the incorporation of “present-on-admission” into hospital claims and in demonstrating the benefits of enhancing claims data with numerical laboratory results.Dr. Pine is the author of more than 75 peer-reviewed publications in basic science, clinical medicine, medical decision-making, and evaluation of comparative clinical performance. He has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Health Data Organizations and is the recipient of its 2008 Eliot M. Stone Award of Excellence on Health Data Leadership.Dr. Pine is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, and the American Heart Association. He holds degrees from Brandeis University, the Harvard Medical School, and the University of Cincinnati School of Business. He has served on the medical faculties of Harvard, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Chicago. He also has been project manager for clinical indicators at the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, director of a pilot peer-review organization for the Veterans Administration, chief of cardiology at the Cincinnati Veterans Administration Medical Center, and a staff member of the Medical Economics and Long Term Care Branches of the National Center for Health Services Research and Development.