About us

GAM is a consortium of physicians setting new standards for high quality medical care

GAM was started by a small group of doctors in 2015 that set out on a mission with one goal: curbing the healthcare cost crisis by driving down low-value and unnecessary medical care. GAM has since expanded to over 30 specialties representing thousands of hours of collective physician focus groups across the United States.

 

As an organization of physicians for physicians, our goal is to extract maximal clinical consensus around best practices. These best practices are detailed by our sophisticated practice pattern standards which are derived from clinical wisdom and a judicious evaluation of the medical literature. We believe that such a task can only be accomplished through the convening of great clinical minds.

Overtreatment is one of the root causes of the affordable care crisis.

That’s why we’ve conducted thousands of interviews and focus groups with specialists across various fields of medicine to find discernible patterns of unnecessary medical care. Using clinical wisdom from experts, GAM creates sophisticated algorithms which identify practice patterns that are excessive or inappropriate. GAM offers these appropriateness measures to health care organizations so they can measure low-value care and track improvement. 

Who we work with

GAM for Hospital Systems and Physician Groups

We partner with hospital systems and physician groups to standardize quality. With the advent of the modern multi-hospital health systems, monitoring quality across a group of hospitals can be challenging. We notify hospital leadership of outlier practice patterns to help fuel internal quality improvement efforts with meaningful data at the individual physician level. Addressing outlier physicians may not only benefit patients, but it can also avert litigation associated with excessive or inappropriate care. Given the future of value-based health care reimbursement and new physician eMeasures of quality, GAM metrics can help prepare a health system for a new payment landscape.

GAM for Healthcare Technology Companies

We partner with some of the largest healthcare IT and analytics companies in the United States. Our partners build our metric library into their products to show hotspots of clinical waste at the individual provider level. Extreme outlier physician practice patterns exist and are now measurable.

GAM for TPAs

We partner with third party administrators to provide powerful information to patients on areas of inappropriate, hazardous, and expensive medical care. Patient navigation and steerage, powered with the right data, represent a new opportunity to navigate an otherwise challenging health care ecosystem, where high and low quality medical care can be nearly impossible to discern. Navigation away from a single low-value provider could have significant quality and cost implications.

GAM for Health Plans

We partner with some of the largest commercial and government payors in the United States to help identify physicians with outlier practice patterns. This information can be shared back to physicians to facilitate data-driven behavior change to decrease over-utilization. It can also be used to design or augment preferred, high-value, provider networks.

Meet our leadership

Marty Makary, MD, MPH

Co-Founder and President

Will Bruhn, MD

Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer

Marlin Schul
Marlin W. Schul, MD, MBA

Senior Clinical Lead

Malina Manger

Chief of Staff

Sina Haeri, MD, MHSA

Clinical Lead, Maternal Fetal Medicine

Rakesh Patel, MD

Clinical Lead, Psychiatry

Joni Sago, MD

Clinical Lead, Dermatology

Stephen Williams, MD, MBA

Clinical Lead, Urology

Venu Nemani, MD, PhD

Clinical Lead, Spine Surgery

Cliff Jones, MD

Clinical Lead, Orthopedic Surgery

Lisa Karasik, RN

Clinical Measure Specialist