Who is Dr. Marcus Plescia?
Marcus Plescia has over 30 years of leadership experience in public health and clinical medicine. In his current position as the chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) he serves as a trusted consultant and subject matter expert with state health leaders across the nation. He has experience running complex public health programs with significant human, financial and information resources and has held leadership roles in academic medicine and in government at the local, state and national level.
Over the course of his career he has led efforts to enact systemic public health interventions including expansion of state and local tobacco control policies, increased participation in cancer screening and improved mechanisms to monitor prescription pain medications and infectious disease reporting. He has been prominent in nationwide efforts to transform public health practice to a more population-based, strategic framework and to increase integration between primary care medicine and public health.
Marcus Plescia is a board-certified family medicine physician. His clinical work has been focused in medically underserved settings. He has worked providing medical services to uninsured and homeless in the Bronx, Native American communities and in federally-qualified health centers. He has extensive academic experience in Family Medicine and has authored over 70 scientific publications. He currently serves on the American Cancer Society Mission Outcomes Committee, the Federal Advisory Committee for the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program and the Board of Directors of the National Forum for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention. He is a past President of the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors.
Storied Career in Charlotte, NC
Marcus Plescia was an attending physician on the family medicine residency faculty at Carolinas Healthcare System in Charlotte NC from 1995–2003. The hospital system was building a new primary care facility in an underserved African American community and he helped develop a community-led coalition to identify and address prioritized health issues. He also helped launch a new satellite residency training site at the facility. He recruited trainees to that program and managed it for 5 years.
Since then, this training site has expanded and continues to attract a more diverse candidate pool to the residency program. He also led the design and evaluation plan for a large, multi-component community intervention to impact health disparities in heart disease and diabetes. He received a $7 million competitive grant from CDC to support this work over an eight-year period. He worked extensively with the county health department to develop a community health worker program, support diabetes self-management at the health center and address barriers to healthy behavior through policy and systems changes. Over the next decade, the interventions led to nationally-recognized improvements in community-wide health behavior.
While at Carolinas Healthcare system Marcus Plescia was awarded the Eugene Meyer Traveling AHEC Fellowship to study General Practice/Public Health partnerships in England. In 2000, he received the David Citron Award from the UNC statewide Department of Family Medicine as an Outstanding Junior Faculty in Family Medicine in North Carolina.
Marcus Plescia returned to North Carolina in 2014 to become the public health director for Mecklenburg County, eight months after the management of the health department was returned to the county. The local health care system had managed it for the previous 20-years. During this time of significant organizational change, he worked with county management to align the department with national efforts to transform public health practice to a population-based, strategic framework. He led the expansion of the health department from 400 to over 800 employees, through the addition of environmental health, school health and behavioral health programs. He expanded and reorganized the health department leadership team to increase programmatic oversight capacity and create a more diverse and inclusive leadership team, and began a process to evaluate and redirect existing programs.
During his tenure, Marcus Plescia led major changes in strategic direction that transitioned the department to a health policy and community health focus, with a much greater emphasis on the prevention and control of chronic disease and the development of community campaigns to influence social norms. He expanded the scope and scale of the health promotion, planning and community engagement programs to help the department take a more ‘upstream’ approach to preventing illness.
He also helped establish a new semi-independent institute at the UNC-Charlotte College of Health and Human Services (The Academy for Public Health Innovation) to augment data and information resource capacity, and advocate for public health issues. He led the adoption of local policies and regulations, including an expanded community-wide tobacco ban and vending standards for government worksites. He also participated directly in developing community interventions, including a farmer’s market and local shops initiative, and expanded the scope and scale of a faith-based initiative (Village Heartbeat) to address heart disease risk factors in the African American community. The American Hospital Association has recognized his role nationally in helping develop and facilitate a collaborative, access to care initiative between the two competing health systems in Charlotte.
These efforts to engage the health department in nationwide efforts to transform public health practice to a more population-based, strategic framework were well-received by health department employees, county leadership and policy makers. They also gained national attention. His focus on data driven interventions and systems change led to participation in the De Beaumont Foundation’s City Health Initiative and the Build Health Challenge which was funded by multiple national foundations.
In 2016, Marcus Plescia was awarded the Advocacy Award by the North Carolina chapter of the American Heart Association for his work in these areas. In 2017, Mecklenburg county’s use of public policy to address local public health issues was featured at the NACCHO annual conference in a general session plenary panel alongside the widely-regarded Boston Public Health Commission.
Personal Life
Marcus Plescia is the son of Joseph Plescia a former classics professor at Florida State University and Gillian Lane-Plescia a speech and dialect consultant for professional actors and theaters (www.dialectresource.com). His parents both emigrated to the United States as adults and his extended family lives in England and Italy. He grew up in an international setting and has travelled extensively. He is married to Ruth Ann Grissom, a conservationist who writes for the Urban Institute at UNC-Charlotte. They live in Charlotte NC and spend time in the Uwharrie Mountains where Marcus pursues his interests in woodworking and cider maker.
