Improving Management of TIA: Case Study of a Broken Health System

S. Claiborne Johnston, MD, PhD
Adjunct Professor, UCSF Department of Neurology
Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Harbor Health

Clay Johnston, MD, PhD, MPH is a neurologist and epidemiologist who has toiled throughout his career to improve health. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Harbor Health, a vertically integrated health delivery system that launched in 2022 in Austin, Texas. Harbor is working with employers and Medicare to redesign benefits and care to achieve the best health possible while reducing waste.

From 2014 to 2021, Clay was the inaugural Dean of the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. There he tried to create a new model for academic medicine that was better aligned with society’s interests.  The school’s curriculum incorporated human-centered design, leadership, population health, and systems engineering to train physicians who could focus not just on the patient in front of them but also on the broader health system. His work in the community was recognized with his naming of Austinite of the Year in 2016 by the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

Clay spent most of his career at the University of California, San Francisco, where he served as Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Associate Vice Chancellor of Research, Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology, and founding director of the Center for Healthcare Value. Clay is a graduate of Amherst College, completed medical school at Harvard University, and received an MPH and PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his residency in Neurology at UCSF, where he later trained in Vascular Neurology.

Clay continues his research in vascular neurology with a focus on identifying risk factors and secondary prevention treatments after TIA and ischemic stroke. He has led three multicenter randomized trials and several large cohort studies of cerebrovascular disease. He has won several national awards for his research and teaching. He has been honored with the American Heart Association’s Feinberg Award for clinical stroke research, as well as the Academy of Neurology’s Pessin Prize for Stroke Leadership and the American Stroke Association’s Siekert New Investigator Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

At the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to:

1. Understand the prognosis of patients with transient ischemic attack.
2. Identify appropriate treatments for TIA.
3. Recognize major inefficiencies in the health innovation system.