Kevin Larsen, MD, FACP
Dr. Kevin Larsen is Senior Vice President, Clinical Innovation at Optum. Kevin leads Optum Insight clinical decision support platform and Clinical Assistant. Previously he was the Chief Medical Officer of OptumLabs where he supported the design and implementation of innovative research, analytics and evidence-based translation programs in diverse areas across our portfolio. Additionally, he was the primary clinical lead of the Optum Enterprise strategy, an initiative to modernize and integrate Optum products and services.
Kevin is an internist and medical informaticist who started his career at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis where he had a variety of executive and clinical leadership roles. He has worked in academic, hospital and government settings, focusing on innovation through data and analytics, research, policy and developing/implementing novel programs at scale.
He joined Optum from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where most recently he has been Senior Health IT Advisor at the office of the Chief Technology Officer. There he was the executive lead for the 10-billion-dollar Indian Health Service Electronic Health Record Modernization Project. Kevin established and led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) strategic planning and transformation team under Dr. Patrick Conway and Andy Slavitt. In that role was on the CMS executive team where he convened stakeholders across CMS and its partners to develop strategies and execute enterprise program improvements. He consulted on health IT policy, standards and project execution for numerous Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) models, such as Million Hearts, Oncology Bundle, State Innovation Models and Accountable Health Communities. He started his Washington D.C. career at Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the Medical Director of Meaningful Use where he led ONCs work on quality policy, measurement and improvement, including clinical decision support. There he established the electronic clinical quality measure certification, related tools such as the Value Set Authority Center and the HL7 Clinical Quality Language (CQL.)
Earlier, Kevin was CMIO and Associate Medical Director of Hennepin Health System. He is an associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. He was the founder and leader of the Center for Urban Health, a health equity focused health services research institute. Here his research included health care financing for people living in poverty, social drivers of health, health equity and the digital divide.
Kevin has extensive policy and advocacy experience in health IT, value-based payment, quality measurement, quality measure programs, Medicaid, CMS innovation models and HHS operations.
