Marc T. Edwards photo

Biographical Sketch

Marc Edwards brings 30+ years of diverse healthcare management and consulting experience to help clients improve quality, profitability and resource use. Once a chair of Family Medicine in a multi-specialty group practice, he has since served as the senior physician executive in both community and university teaching hospitals. He donates significant professional time to management research. He is a thought leader in the domain of clinical peer review process.

He initially came to the consulting field through work with Ernst & Young’s Healthcare practice in the late 90’s. He demonstrated expertise in group facilitation, performance improvement program development, patient-related process redesign, metrics, data analysis and display, and medical cost control. When E & Y divested that practice, he founded his own firm to develop practical products and services to serve neglected areas of medical management with evidence-based tools. 

He subsequently leveraged his experience with clinical peer review process improvement to fill the vacuum of management research in this field. He conceived and orchestrated the first-ever national survey of peer review practices, which grew to become into an eight-year project following the evolution of peer review practices and their relation to clinical quality and safety among 400+ organizations. Through these initiatives, he was able to characterize and elaborate an evidence-based approach for conducting clinical peer review within a quality improvement framework - the QI Model, buttressed by a Clinical Peer Review Program Self-Assessment Inventory and 11 published manuscripts. To further advance this work, he formed and managed an AHRQ-listed Patient Safety Organization from 2010 to 2019. He also designed the Ideal Clinical Peer Review Process Collaborative, the Normative Peer Review Database Project and an Organizational Learning Framework for patient safety. He continues to operate a Connecticut-authorized Patient Safety Organization.

A native of Seattle, he graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his MD degree from the University of Colorado, trained in Family Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and later completed the Executive MBA program at the University of Connecticut. He maintains board certification in Family Medicine. When not occupied with health care management activities, he promotes awareness of the timeless wisdom of Ayurveda for better self-care through lectures, cooking classes and personal consultations, tends an organic garden, and creates photographric art.