The Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation was established in the Division of General Internal Medicine (DGIM) at Mass General in 2001 to honor Dr. John D. Stoeckle, celebrating his half-century of work improving the quality and delivery of primary care.

Dr. Stoeckle, who essentially founded the DGIM at MGH in 1952, adhered to an approach he called “plain doctoring,” emphasizing listening to patients and shared decision-making. He championed the centrality of the patient in primary care and the centrality of primary care in health care.  He was also a pioneer in team-based medicine, involving nurses and social workers as full partners in patient care.

For more than 20 years, the Stoeckle Center has been devoted to revitalizing and redesigning the delivery of primary care, working to make the primary care experience better for the patient, clinicians and other staff, in the practices at Mass General, across Mass General Brigham, in Massachusetts and beyond.

Susan Edgman-Levitan, PA was recruited shortly after the founding of the Stoeckle Center to serve as its first and only Executive Director.  In this role, Susan has been a guiding force for numerous clinical, research, and educational programs and it is impossible to separate the accomplishments of the Center from the accomplishments of its Executive Director.  To name just a few of these many accomplishments:

• • Piloted an evidence-based model for behavioral health integration into primary care via a multidisciplinary care team that laid the groundwork for wide-scale implementation across MGB.
  • Led an initiative to improve patients’ experience of care in adult and pediatric primary care across all MGB practices that improved patient experience scores to above average compared to other primary care practices in Massachusetts.
  • Designed and supported the Crimson Care Collaborative (CCC), a partnership between the Stoeckle Center and the MGH Institute of Health Professions to introduce health professional and undergraduate students to the practice of primary care that won the national Public Health Excellence in Interprofessional Education Collaboration (IPEC) Award in 2019.
  • Led the implementation of shared decision-making and related research across MGB; in 2005, the Stoeckle Center pioneered the first “prescribed” video and booklet decision aids in primary care practice. This successful project led to broad use of decision aids across MGH, and to the creation of the MGH Health Decisions Science Center in 2010
  • Published a seminal paper with Michael Barry MD on patient-centered care and shared-decision making that inspired the international “What Matters to You” Movement in 55 different countries.
  • Led patient and family-centered experience of care quality work across MGB for 13 years.
  • Served as principal investigator on the national Consumer Assessments of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) study for 31 years.

Susan has been more than an extraordinary leader of the Stoeckle Center. She has also been a key leader of our primary care activities across DGIM and MGB primary care more broadly, including our establishment of Patient-Centered Medical Home status for our primary care practices, integration of novel patient reported experience measures into our operational workflows, and countless mentoring and coaching activities that touched individual colleagues and entire practice sites.

We are now embarking on a transition for both the Stoeckle Center and Susan.  The Center will now be renamed the Stoeckle Health Decision Sciences Center under the leadership of Karen Sepucha, PhD (Director) and Leigh Simmons, MD (Medical Director), who have been outstanding leaders of the program at MGH. Together, they established the Health Decision Sciences Center as a world-leading program for developing, implementing and evaluating tools for improved shared decision-making and for amplifying the patient’s voice in health care decisions.  They have worked alongside Susan and the Stoeckle Center staff since 2010 in designing and delivering programs in shared decision making. A few of the Center’s projects include overseeing the delivery of more than 100,000 patient decisions aids across MGB, training primary care physicians to improve decisions about stopping cancer screening, and collaborating with colleagues in orthopedics and cardiology to promote patient involvement in surgical decision making. Susan will stay on as an Emeritus Director for the coming year to help guide the transition in center programs and activities.

We’ll find time later this academic year to celebrate Susan’s many accomplishments and properly thank her for all she has done to support and strengthen DGIM.  But I know that the most meaningful testament to her work is that the Stoeckle Center will continue to move forward into the future under the excellent guidance of Karen and Leigh.  No doubt John Stoeckle would be proud.

It seems most appropriate to end where we started, with Dr. Stoeckle’s foundational role in patient-centered care. Within the demands of a busy primary care clinic, John Stoeckle maintained a respectful focus on the person in front of him, with a boundless curiosity that fostered connection and a healing presence like no other.  What a lesson for our age and our work at MGB.