Medical Affairs
Who We Are and What We Do
UnitedHealth Group’s (UHG) Medical Affairs department is committed to clinical integrity and health stewardship. We have an intentional enterprise lens that allows us to identify and help mitigate enterprise risks to clinical integrity. We are collaborative with and supportive of our enterprise-wide clinicians and segment health programs.
As an enterprise convener, we work to bring the right teams together from across our businesses to help solve shared health and clinical quality priorities.
Medical Affairs Focused on Four Strategic Priorities:
- Clinical Quality and Patient Safety
- Clinician Development
- Clinical Modernization and Transformation
- Clinician Experience
Clinical Quality and Patient Safety
Our Clinical Quality and Patient Safety (QPS) work is focused on facilitating consistent excellence in health outcomes by advancing our culture of clinical quality and patient safety.
Medical Affairs leverages an enterprise-level operating model with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and business expectations to oversee a matrixed governance structure. This structure brings together accountable quality and data leaders from across UHG businesses to monitor performance against externally benchmarked quality and patient safety metrics, and to coordinate the reporting, evaluation, communication, tracking, and mitigation of risks.
Medical Affairs provides oversight and guidance on clinical quality assurance, decision-making, continuous improvement, risk management, and executive reporting. This QPS enterprise connectivity structure encourages peer-to-peer learning, transfer of best practices, and accountability at all levels, from frontline service delivery to executive leadership. Medical Affairs intentionally engages and connects clinicians and other experts in peer networks to support and drive QPS performance within their clinical domains and fosters an accountable, engaged learning workforce through continued QPS training opportunities for all employees.
Clinician Development
Collaborating across the enterprise to help develop, guide, and engage an invigorated, distinctive clinician workforce, both on an individual and organizational level, helps ensure we are ready to support the highest quality of care to patients and members.
Medical Affairs facilitates professional development for current UHG clinicians and also helps cultivate the next generation of clinical talent. In partnership with the People Team and the businesses, we work to ensure accessibility, differentiation, and amplification of clinician workforce development opportunities across the enterprise.
Medical Affairs is home to:
Optum Health Education (OHE), a jointly accredited provider of continuing education (CE) for healthcare professionals and the primary health education resource for UHG employees.
The Center for Clinician Advancement, an online enterprise resource for UHG clinicians dedicated to fostering a vibrant clinician community, celebrating clinical excellence through recognition programs, and supporting ongoing professional development.
Clinical Modernization and Transformation
Our Clinical Modernization and Transformation efforts work to achieve clinical excellence by providing clinical insights and enabling initiatives that maximize clinical impact.
Through collaboration with stakeholders across the enterprise, the team helps develop end-to-end, comprehensive longitudinal care models focused on industry and enterprise-level health priorities to improve population health. Additionally, the team helps inform and modernize clinical practices and thinking through the development of clinical data measurement frameworks that provide executive level reporting, consistency and standardization, trends and data visualization, and clinical insights into quality, patient safety, our clinician workforce, and enterprise risk.
Clinician Experience
Our clinician experience strategy includes efforts to increase engagement and professional fulfillment, improve connectedness to the enterprise and to each other, and reinforce the contributions and impact of UHG clinicians through engaging tactics, initiatives, and recognition campaigns.
A positive workplace experience helps support the recruitment, retention, performance, and well-being of our clinical talent. Our focus on improving the UHG clinician experience helps cultivate and maintain a robust, invigorated, and distinctive workforce of clinicians that serves to benefit the people, communities, and customers we serve.