Tim Bartholow

As Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of WEA Trust Insurance, Dr. Tim Bartholow is tasked with leading all clinical functions to achieve safer more affordable care, focusing on proper access, appropriateness, harm avoidance, and engaging members to action. He encourages community health with board service to Wisconsin Literacy, United Way of Dane County, and the Wisconsin Collaborative for Health Care Quality. He advises Venture Investors, Kiio, the University of Wisconsin Master of Public Health Program, Wisconsin Community Health Fund, and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

Before joining the Trust, Dr. Bartholow served as the Wisconsin Medical Society’s Chief Medical Officer for five years, working on appropriateness of care and unintended variation of episode costs, advance care planning, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation grant SMARTCare, and payment reform. Prior to joining the Society in November 2008, Dr. Bartholow spent 16 years caring for patients at the Prairie Clinic in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he was one of 12 clinical owners. In the late 1990s, he served as Medical Director for a risk bearing independent physician association with more than 400 primary care providers. He completed family medicine residency at The University of Missouri – Columbia, medical school at Washington University – St. Louis, and chemistry and biology degrees at Drake University.

WEA Trust knows that health care can be safer, more effective, more approachable and more affordable. WEA Trust supports partners who reduce unintended variation in care that is costly and too often harmful. The Trust seeks partners who deploy key information to families and physicians so they choose safety and affordability, and receive timely feedback if they choose differently. Increasingly, families cannot access care because of cost, making cost a measure of quality – WEA Trust feels that it’s past time that it is treated it as such. WEA Trust partners with technology solutions that intuitively link those that need to know with decision changing content. Health risks of the patient as well as the social determinants of health which they endure must equally be addressed if we are to achieve vibrant community health.