Carol Paret
SVP & Chief Community Health Officer
Memorial Hermann Health System
Carol Paret is the Senior Vice President/Chief Community Health Officer for Memorial Hermann Healthcare System (MHHS) and the CEO of Memorial Hermann Community Benefit Corporation. Carol completed her undergraduate work at the University of Houston and her graduate studies at University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston. Her career began in community health planning and for the past 31 years, Carol has worked for MHHS.
Among Carol’s many accomplishments with the Memorial Hermann, Community Benefit Corporation is a partnership with five school districts, Houston, Pasadena, Aldine, Alief, and Lamar Consolidated, called The Health Centers for Schools Program designed to provide a “medical home” for uninsured and Medicaid children K-12th grade. The program offers access to primary medical care, dental care, mental health counseling, social services, and nutrition counseling. Each of the 10 clinics is staffed by a nurse practitioner/physician assistant, social worker, licensed vocational nurse, and a receptionist with dietitian support and physician oversight provided. The Centers are open year-round, five days a week and serve students in the schools’ designated elementary, middle and high school feeder patterns.
She is currently serving as past Board Chairman of Gateway to Care, a collaborative involving 165+ agencies whose mission is to improve access to care for Houston’s uninsured, and the Provider Health Network, a project promoting better access to specialty care. In addition, Carol has served on the board of Texas Health Institute since 2012 and currently serves as Chair.
Along with overseeing Memorial Hermann’s community benefit efforts, Carol is the system’s privacy and security officer. Having witnessed the tremendous power that healthcare information can have both positively and negatively on the lives of individuals, she has worked to ensure Memorial Hermann protects the privacy and security of the information entrusted to it.
Since 1992, Carol Paret has had executive responsibility for the Memorial Hermann physician residency program. The program has grown to 42 residents per year and has graduated hundreds of primary care physicians during Carol’s years of service. These residents provide a significant amount of the much needed primary care to the Greater Houston community with over 50,000 clinic encounters annually. The MHHS residency program was the first residency program in Texas to achieve level 3 primary medical home status and was one of the first to have an electronic medical record (EMR). Working with funding partners, Carol’s team has been able to provide an integrated behavioral health care model to our patients, provide our residents with a state of the art simulation lab, and care for a significant number of uninsured patients.
In 1994, Carol began directing the Clinical Medical Education (CME) department at Memorial Hermann. Through her efforts, MHHS has achieved system accreditation, including the movement to web-based programs, which is saving physicians significant time and money.
In 2008, Carol began overseeing the centralization of the medical records function at MHHS to improve the efficiency and the quality of this vitally important department while significantly reducing the cost. Toward that goal, Carol led a documentation improvement effort that has saved MHHS millions of dollars while improving the ability to accurately capture the clinical conditions of our patients. In order to improve the clinical care we provide, Carol created an interim imaged record solution so that the complete medical record would be available, on an ongoing basis, to clinicians while the transition to a complete EMR is in process.
