Quality’s Next Chapter: Vivek Garg Opens NCQA’s Health Innovation Summit With a Call to Focus, Align and “Prove it”

At the opening of the 2026 Health Innovation Summit in Atlanta, NCQA President and CEO Dr. Vivek Garg reflected on his first year leading the organization, honored the legacy of healthcare quality pioneers and invited attendees to help shape what comes next. Addressing a room filled with health plans, clinicians, policymakers, researchers, employers, technology leaders and patient advocates, he framed the Summit theme, Quality’s Next Chapter, as both a moment of reflection and a call to action.

“A year ago, many of you met me for the first time on this stage, when Peggy O’Kane handed off an organization she spent more than three decades building,” Dr. Garg said. “I’ve spent the year since mostly listening.”

That year of listening, he said, clarified NCQA’s mission and reinforced a central belief: “we cannot write quality’s next chapter alone.”

Quality Is Personal

Dr. Garg anchored his remarks in a deeply personal story about his mother, who lived with bipolar disorder and experienced both the strengths and shortcomings of the healthcare system.

“My first understanding of quality didn’t come from a scorecard, or a boardroom, or even from medical school,” he said. “It came from my mother.”

Although her appointments were completed and treatments documented, his family often found themselves navigating the healthcare system alone. The difference, he explained, was not technology or resources, but whether someone took responsibility for helping her improve. “It was whether anyone was accountable for her getting better,” he said.

That experience shaped his career as a physician and healthcare leader and informed one of his defining messages: “Quality isn’t an abstract property of an institution. It’s what happens to a person.”

Honoring NCQA’s Past

While emphasizing the need for change, Dr. Garg also celebrated the quality movement’s accomplishments and the role NCQA and its partners have played in transforming healthcare. “There was a time when healthcare quality was, functionally, in the dark,” Dr. Garg said. “You could not reliably tell a strong health plan from a weak one. And improvement was nearly impossible, because you couldn’t see where care was failing.”

He pointed to NCQA’s Accreditation programs, HEDIS^® and Patient-Centered Medical Home Recognition as examples of initiatives that helped create transparency, accountability and a shared language for improvement.

“Care gaps that were invisible became visible. Organizations built improvement capabilities that simply had not existed before,” Dr. Garg said. “NCQA did not do that alone. It happened because quality leaders translated standards into daily operations, clinicians changed how they practiced, purchasers demanded accountability.”

At the same time, he stressed that honoring the past does not mean preserving every process exactly as it exists today.

“Thirty-five years ago, healthcare needed more light. Today we have a thousand lights,” he said. “And when enough valid lights point in enough different directions, you don’t get illumination. You get glare.”

Listening to the Field

Dr. Garg shared some of the lessons he learned from stakeholders over the past year. Across conversations with health plans, clinicians, employers, states, federal agencies and technology partners, three themes emerged.

The first theme was clear: help us focus. Stakeholders told NCQA that quality programs have become too numerous and too disconnected from the outcomes that matter most.

The second was to align. Organizations want quality programs, standards and measures to work together as a more cohesive system.

The third was to prove it. Stakeholders are asking whether quality programs and accreditation efforts actually produce measurable improvements in care and outcomes.

“Not one person told me NCQA should step back,” he said. “What I heard, everywhere, was that this field wants NCQA to step forward, differently.”

The First Step Toward ‘Proving It’

Dr. Garg announced that NCQA recently published a report examining how NCQA Health Plan Accreditation relates to Star Ratings performance in Medicare Advantage (MA) across 838 plans, 13 HEDIS measures and three years of data.

“You’ve asked, fairly, whether any of this actually makes people healthier. That is the right question. Here’s how we’re starting to answer it,” he said.

The report found that Accredited MA plans reached four or more Stars 66% of the time compared with non-Accredited plans at 52%, a 14-percentage-point difference in Measurement Year 2024. Accredited MA plans averaged 4 percentage points higher across the 13 HEDIS measures NCQA analyzed.

These findings are associational, not causal. Accredited plans may differ from non-Accredited plans in other meaningful ways. But the consistency across measures and years is striking.

View the full report here.

Looking to the Future

For NCQA, the path forward comes down to three priorities: Focus on what matters. Align around it. Accelerate measurable improvement.

No single organization can cut through the glare alone. But together, the quality improvement community can connect those lights—and make the next right action clear.

“For more than thirty-five years, this community helped this country see quality,” he said. “The next chapter is about helping every person and family get the care they deserve. Let’s write it together.”

Learn More

We will post more insights from the Health Innovation Summit on our blog, so stay tuned.

HEDIS^® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).