Ramon S. Cancino, M.D., M.B.A., M.S., FAAFP

Ramon Cancino, M.D., M.B.A., M.S., FAAFP is Associate Professor/Clinical in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at UT Health San Antonio. He serves as the Executive Director of the UT Health Physicians Primary Care Center and Senior Medical Director of Medical Management. He is passionate about developing systems to deliver high-value care and preparing physicians to take systems-level approaches to enhancing care delivery for patient populations. Following family medicine residency at Mayo Clinic, he completed an Academic Medicine fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine where his research focused on hospital readmission, behavioral health integration, and quality improvement. During this time, he received his Master of Science in Health Services Research at Boston University School of Public Health and completed a Clinical Research Training program at Boston University School of Medicine. Following fellowship, Dr. Cancino assumed the role of Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of a federally qualified health center in Boston, MA, where he made significant systems-related improvements leveraged upon the evolving reimbursement models resulting from health care reform in the state and country. During his tenure as CMO, his organization achieved NCQA Patient-Centered Medical Home accreditation, developed and implemented programs to integrate behavioral health and HIV/AIDS care with primary care, expanded primary care access, enhanced population health management programs for chronic disease, substance abuse, and high-risk patient populations, developed a quality improvement program which drew positive attention from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and developed local standards for measuring and reporting quality metrics to local, state, federal, and private entities. Dr. Cancino has extensive experience collaborating with institutional, local, and state stakeholders. He enhanced institutional partnerships with community-based and hospital partners. For example, he partnered with an academic medical center to develop a successful health center model of opioid abuse and chronic pain group visits. He collaborated with two academic medical centers to start Centering Pregnancy, an initiative using the group visit model in pre-natal care. He collaborated with an academic institution, two local schools, and a community center in order to train social work students in high-need patient populations and deliver behavioral health education and treatment directly to community members. Dr. Cancino has experience in health care reform, especially leveraging value-based care models to enhance delivery of primary care. In development and implementation of Massachusetts’s “Primary Care Payment Reform” initiative, he worked with local and state leadership to determine reimbursable process and outcome metrics, developed ways to teach frontline staff about quality measurement and data, and developed the local structure through which such metrics were measured and reported. As a member of the Boston Accountable Care Organization’s Quality, Clinical, and Information Technology Informatics Committee, he reviewed payer contract-defined metrics, developed payment structures, and determined reporting requirements for ACO member sites.  In his current role as Primary Care Center Director at UT Health Physicians, Dr. Cancino oversees the clinical operations at eight UT Health Physicians primary care locations: UT Health MARC, UT Health Medical Drive, UT Health Westover Hills, UT Health Hill Country, UT Health Shavano, UT Health Verde Hills, UT Health De Zavala, and UT Health Kyle Seale Parkway. He is among the leads UT Health San Antonio’s value-based care delivery strategy and is a member of the Board of Directors of UT Health San Antonio’s ACO, Regional Physicians Network. Dr. Cancino was nominted and appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Standing Committee on Primary Care and has been invited to speak and teach his work in multiple local, state, and national forums, including the Society for Teachers in Family Medicine, Academy Health, Mayo Clinic, Boston University School of Medicine, the American Cancer Society, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.