Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, FRCP Joins COTA's Board of Directors

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Apr 12, 2016) - COTA, Inc., a health care informatics company, announced today the addition of Dr. Donald Berwick, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and current president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, to its board of directors. Throughout Berwick's professional career, improving health care quality and effectiveness has been the cornerstone of his work -- a purpose that fundamentally aligns with COTA's mission to generate a global transition to value-based medicine.

Working with that goal in mind, COTA is building research-grade, real-world data that has the capacity to radically reshape cancer care. By harnessing the power of the first, only and patented COTA Nodal Address (CNA) classification system -- which precisely categorizes patient factors, types of diseases and intended therapies -- COTA gives providers the data necessary to offer the best treatment available to their patients, for the best possible clinical outcome while reducing cost.

"We are very pleased to have Dr. Berwick join the COTA team and bring such a deep level of expertise as we leverage the power and possibility of technology to turn data into knowledge that providers, payers, pharma and patients can use every day," said Dr. Andrew Pecora, COTA founder and executive chairman. "His extensive experience in the quality and improvement of health care systems will further position COTA as the leader in assisting oncologists to optimize cancer care and make the transition to a value-based health care system moving forward."

Berwick began his career as a pediatrician at Harvard Community Health Plan, and in 1983, became the plan's first vice president of quality-of-care measurement. In that position, Berwick investigated quality control measures in other industries such as aeronautics and manufacturing in order to consider their application in health care settings. From 1987 to 1991, Berwick co-founded and led the National Demonstration Project on Quality Improvement in Health Care as principal investigator.

Prior to his appointment by President Barack Obama to serve as the administrator of CMS in 2010, Berwick co-founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, where he led as president and CEO for 18 years. During his tenure, Berwick studied the management of health care systems with emphasis on using scientific methods and evidence-based medicine as well as comparative effectiveness research to improve the tradeoff among quality, safety and costs.

"The very essence of 'quality' in health care is to assure that the work of care exactly matches the needs of every single patient, every single time," Berwick said. "When care matches needs, suffering decreases and usually so do costs. COTA's breakthrough technologies offer hope of helping to create, discover and support care for cancer and for other diseases, which turns that vision into a reality. COTA is developing ways to help care providers and other clinicians do exactly what they want to do: give every single patient the best possible chance for improved life and health."

Health care industry veteran, previous director of the National Cancer Institute and commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, is another valuable member on the COTA board of directors.

"We couldn't be more thrilled to welcome the former CMS administrator, Dr. Berwick, to the COTA board," von Eschenbach said. "His overwhelming wealth of knowledge and experience will be a great addition as COTA moves along the trajectory to providing true, measurable value and increased effectiveness of care across the U.S. and eventually world-wide."

About COTA Inc.
COTA is the health care informatics company that builds research-grade real-world data to exponentially improve outcomes, reduce cost, and ensure the right care for the right patient every time. The patented COTA Nodal Address (CNA) is the first and only digital classification system that transforms prognostically significant variables into a digital code -- precisely categorizing patient factors, their diseases and intended therapies to measure treatment outcomes, identify variances in care, enable quality benchmarking, research, discovery and the transition to value-based medicine. For more information, please visit www.oncota.com.