Dr. Couch is the Immediate Past Program Director and Accreditation Advisor for the MSHA Degree Program at Fordham University in New York City. He is also Adjunct Professor of Health Administration & a Former Fellow at the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center for Fordham University. He began and helped lead Fordham University’s MSHA Program’s successful campaign to receive its and the University’s first CAHME accreditation for excellence in healthcare management education. He helped launch Fordham’s M.S. degree in Applied Health Informatics program and taught Health Data Analytics Leadership in its Oxford University Residency Program for three years.
He has also authored and taught two courses on Population Health Analytics and Law at Thomas Jefferson University, and a popular course on Health AI and Analytics Leadership in both the new M.S. in Health AI program and its Advanced Practice Certificate Program (APC) in Health AI & Analytics Leadership. He also authored a six (6) part continuing education series on Value Based Care at Jefferson and co-authored the chapter on Value Based Care Delivery Models in the 2026 4th edition of the longest published and most used textbook on Population Health. Recently, he has helped lead the accreditation process for Jefferson’s new MHA Program to advance it to official candidacy status. He also authored the university’s first course devoted to Value-Based Care, which he is currently teaching to Masters students in the Fall A 2026 Term.
He has 45 years of accomplishments in healthcare delivery and management emphasizing the evaluation & oversight of health IT systems to improve the demonstrable quality, safety, and value of health care delivery. He has been publishing on value-based purchasing and care delivery since 1987 including an editorial on it in the November 15, 1988, edition of the “Annals of Internal Medicine”. He was the first physician trained by Motorola University to apply Six Sigma Process Evaluation & Improvement to the Healthcare and Insurance Industries in 1992. He published the first two books on what is now called population health management in 1997 and 1998. He also published for Princeton Insurance a comprehensive treatise on Health IT and Patient Safety for Hospitals and Physicians in 2008, acknowledged by the National Academy of Medicine in its seminal work “Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care”.
His most notable accomplishments have been in the use of Advanced Clinical, Care Management and Population Health Analytics Systems. He conceived and led an unprecedented prospective, double blind, randomized controlled clinical trial which demonstrated the 707% ROI of an advanced clinical decision support and care management fulfillment system for the reinsured health plan of a leading academic health system (the University Hospitals Case Western Medical Center & Health System in Cleveland). Three months following publication of this study in a leading peer-reviewed journal, Aetna purchased the company owning this system for $400 million. The Director of the White House Office of Management of the Budget, Peter Orszag, praised this study in the “Washington Post” during debates on the ACA in 2009. Former U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, cited the study in his landmark book, “Saving Lives and Saving Money”. Dr. Couch also introduced and positioned with Humana a leading-edge population health analytics company with the real time technologic products which now serve as the core analytics engine for optimizing the quality and value of care delivered to its 17 million members.
From 1992 through 1994, Dr. Couch was also the only physician Senior Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. During that time, he worked with the Baldrige Program Director at NIST to help develop Health Care Criteria for the Award. He did the same for state quality awards in New York and Connecticut.
Dr. Couch has also advised the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) on how to use Health IT to improve care quality and safety and population health, while decreasing costs and medicolegal liability risks–his version of the Quadruple Aim showcased in his fourth book published in 2014, and initially cited in the February 11, 2013 edition of “JAMA Internal Medicine”.
He earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from Indiana University. In addition to his current teaching roles at Fordham and Thomas Jefferson University, he has also taught at Harvard. Yale, Penn, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Cornell, University of Connecticut & Oxford (Wolfson, Green-Templeton & St. Edmund’s Hall).
Dr. Couch was recently appointed by the Executive Vice President for the Health System and Dean of the PerelmanSchool of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to the Medical Alumni Advisor Council (MAAC).
He founded in 2008 and endowed the Couch Prize in Medicine and Business at the University of Pennsylvania and in 2022 the Couch Data Science Research Fund financing education and research opportunities for Penn students in the latest advanced technologies, including AI and Robotics through the year 2035.