APPENDIX D
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
Planning Committee Biographies
Peter V. Long, PhD (Chair), is president and CEO of Blue Shield of California Foundation, a health foundation established in 2002 to ensure access to quality, affordable care for all Californians, and to end domestic violence. Dr. Long has an extensive background in health policy, working on issues affecting underserved communities at the state, national, and global levels. Previously, Dr. Long served in leadership roles at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and The California Endowment. He received a BA from Harvard University; an MS in health policy from The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health; and a PhD in health services from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Melinda K. Abrams, MS, is a vice president for The Commonwealth Fund’s Health Care Delivery System Reform program. Since coming to the fund in 1997, Ms. Abrams has worked on the fund’s Task Force on Academic Health Centers, the Child Development and Preventive Care program, and, most recently, she led the Patient-Centered Primary Care Program. Ms. Abrams has served on many national committees and boards for private organizations and federal agencies and is a peer-reviewer for several journals. Ms. Abrams holds a BA in history from Cornell University and an MS in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Gerard F. Anderson, PhD, is a professor of health policy and management and director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Hospital Finance and Management. Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins in 1983, Dr. Anderson worked in the Office of the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services from 1978 to 1983. Dr. Anderson is currently conducting research on chronic conditions, comparative insurance systems, medical education, health care payment reform, and technology diffusion. He
has directed reviews of health care systems for the World Bank, World Health Organization, and USAID in multiple countries and has directed more than 100 research projects. He has authored two books on health care payment policy, published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, testified in Congress 50 times, and serves on multiple editorial committees.
Tim Engelhardt, MHS, is the director of the CMS Medicare-Medicaid’s Federal Coordinated Health Care Office. The office was created in the Affordable Care Act to improve services for individuals dually eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. Prior to joining CMS in 2010, Mr. Engelhardt was a consultant with The Lewin Group, where he supported a variety of health and long-term care initiatives for federal, state, and local government agencies. He previously served as the deputy director for long-term care financing at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (the state Medicaid agency). Mr. Engelhardt received a BA in sociology from the University of Notre Dame and an MHS from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Jose Figueroa, MD, MPH, is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). He is also currently a research fellow at the Harvard Initiative for Global Health Quality (HIGH-Q) and the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI). He graduated from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health in 2011 with a concentration in health policy. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in July 2014, where he now serves as faculty director of the BWH Residency Management & Leadership Track. He has previously worked for the Disparities Solutions Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Best Doctors Inc., and the GAVI Alliance in Geneva, Switzerland. Currently, his main research interests include (1) understanding the needs of high-cost, high need patients; (2) improving quality of care for vulnerable populations, including racial/ethnic minorities; and (3) understanding the impact of federal and state regulation on health care quality and costs.
Katherine Hayes, JD, is the director of health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Prior to joining the BPC, Ms. Hayes worked as an associate research professor in the Department of Health Policy at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and served as codirector of Health Reform GPS: Navigating Health Reform Implementation, a website jointly sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and GW’s Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program. She also taught graduate courses in federal
advocacy and policy making and the federal budget process. Prior to joining GW, Hayes served as vice president of health policy for Jennings Policy Strategies, Inc. Other private-sector experience includes legal practice as a member of the health and legislative practice groups at Hogan & Hartson, LLP (now Hogan Lovells); policy director for two large Catholic health systems; and policy director for Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital. Her government experience includes serving as legislative counsel to Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN); legislative assistant to Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) and Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX); and as a program consultant for the State of Missouri Medicaid agency. Ms. Hayes also worked as a health and education policy adviser for the State of Texas, Office of State-Federal Relations. She received a BA in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a JD from The American University Washington College of Law.
Frederick Isasi, JD, MPH, is the current executive director of Families USA. He previously served as the health division director with the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center). In that role, he oversaw the entire Health Division portfolio, including work related to: health care service delivery and payment reform; Medicaid reform and cost containment; state employee and retiree health benefits; maternal and child health; public health; prescription drug abuse prevention; health information exchange and analytics; behavioral health and the social determinants of health; and health insurance coverage issues such as insurance market reforms and health insurance exchange planning and operations. Previously, he served as the vice president of health policy at The Advisory Board Company, where he founded the health policy division focused on surfacing insights related to transforming the quality and efficiency of health care with a particular focus on risk-based payments, accountable care, population health, patient engagement, and payment bundling. Mr. Isasi also served for 5 years as the senior legislative counsel for health care to Senator Jeff Bingaman, working on both the Finance Committee and the Health Education Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee. During his time in the Senate, Mr. Isasi authored numerous health care laws related to Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), payment transformation and accountable care, quality, health information technology, health care workforce, oral health care, public health, and the Food and Drug Administration. He also worked extensively on the Affordable Care Act, including the development of new health insurance exchanges and insurance market reforms. Mr. Isasi graduated with a JD from Duke University Law School and received an MPH from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with honors. He also has published research on the adherence of HIV-positive patients to antiretroviral treatments and has extensive biomedical research experience.
Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, is director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and K.T. Li Professor of International Health & Health Policy, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing internal medicine physician at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Dr. Jha received his MD from Harvard Medical School and trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where he also served as chief medical resident. He completed his general medicine fellowship from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and received his MPH from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Jha’s major research interests lie in improving the quality and costs of health care with a specific focus on the impact of policy efforts. His work has focused on a broad set of issues, including transparency and public reporting of provider performance, financial incentives, health information technology, and leadership, and the roles they play in fixing health care delivery systems.
David Meyers, MD, FAAFP, a board-certified family physician, serves as chief medical officer for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Prior to his appointment to this new position, he directed AHRQ’s Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement, where he led AHRQ’s Improving Primary Care initiative, oversaw the center’s work supporting the US Preventive Services Task Force, the Agency’s Evidence-based Practice Center initiative, Health IT portfolio, Decision Sciences group, and Practice Improvement Division. From 2011–2012 he also served as the Acting Scientific Director for the US Preventive Services Task Force. His recent publications have focused on primary care transformation, the evidence base for the patient-centered medical home, the primary care physician workforce, and foundational thinking about building capacity for ongoing and systematic quality improvement in primary care. Before joining AHRQ in 2004, Dr. Meyers practiced family medicine, including maternity care, in a community health center in southeast Washington, DC, and directed the Georgetown University Department of Family Medicine’s practice-based research network, CAPRICORN. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed his family medicine residency at Providence Hospital/Georgetown University. After residency, he completed fellowship training in primary care health policy and research in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University.
Arnold S. Milstein, MD, MPH, is professor of medicine and the director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC), which is housed in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. CERC designs and demonstrates, in multistate locations, scalable health care delivery innovations that provide better care with less health care spending. His research spans positive value outlier assessment, human-centered health care design, and, in partnership with Stanford’s AI Lab, the development of technology-based cognitive aids to boost the yield from health care spending. Before joining Stanford’s faculty, Dr. Milstein founded a national health care performance-improvement firm that he expanded globally after its acquisition by Mercer. He subsequently cofounded three nationally influential public benefit initiatives, including the Leapfrog Group and the Pacific Business Group on Health. As a congressional MedPAC commissioner, he originated two legislative changes to align health care provider revenue with value to patients. Dr. Milstein was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and cochaired its analysis of opportunities to safely slow national health spending growth.
Diane Stewart, MBA, joined the Pacific Business Group on Health in January 2001. She serves as the senior director for the Redesigning Care portfolio for PBGH. Ms. Stewart created PBGH’s health care improvement initiative, California Quality Collaborative, a statewide collaborative program to reengineer care in the outpatient setting in partnership with commercial health plans, medical groups, and employers. She serves as the lead for PBGH’s CMMI Innovation Award for changing care for high-risk patients, the Intensive Outpatient Care Program, and a CMS-funded Practice Transformation Network program. She also leads the Better Maternity Care program, which applies a combination of payment reform and QI to reduce C-Section rates. Ms. Stewart was a founding member, and now a board member, for the Network for Regional Health Improvement, a national organization of multistakeholder regional health initiatives to promote transparency and system improvement across local health care systems. Previously, she led the technical development team for the Integrated Healthcare Association’s (IHA) Pay for Performance program, which collects and reports measures of clinical performance, patient experience, and IT functionality for 215 medical groups caring for 6 million patients. Prior to joining PBGH, Ms. Stewart was director of quality and planning at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where she initiated the quality program driving improved outcomes in patient satisfaction, clinical performance, financial performance, and staff satisfaction. She has also held management positions at Harvard Community Health Plan as well as other IPAs and medical groups on
the East Coast. Ms. Stewart received a BS in biology from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.
Sandra Wilkniss, PhD, serves as program director for the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices’ Health Division. Dr. Wilkniss focuses on issues related to behavioral health and social determinants of health and the innovative integration of these into health system transformation efforts. She leads the NGA Center’s technical assistance work with states advancing programs for high-need, high-cost populations. Prior to joining NGA, Dr. Wilkniss worked for 3 years in the US Senate as senior legislative assistant for health care to Senators Jeff Bingaman and Martin Heinrich. She joined Senator Bingaman’s staff after serving 1 year as an American Association for the Advancement of Science/American Psychological Association Congressional Fellow in his office. Before her career transition to the health policy field, Dr. Wilkniss worked for 15 years as a scientist-practitioner in adult psychopathology, specializing in serious mental illness. She served as the director of Thresholds Institute at Thresholds Psychiatric Rehabilitation Centers, the research and training arm of the Chicagoland’s largest psychiatric rehabilitation provider. She also served as adjunct assistant professor at Dartmouth Medical School, assistant clinical professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the chief psychologist on the inpatient unit at the University of Illinois at Chicago hospital. Dr. Wilkniss completed her fellowship training at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University & New York Presbyterian Hospital/Payne Whitney Psychosis Clinic and her clinical internship at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia and a BA in psychology from Princeton University. Dr. Wilkniss also holds a certificate in nonprofit management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is licensed to practice psychology in the State of Illinois. She received a Chicago Community Trust Emerging Nonprofit Leader Fellowship Award and the Carol T. Mowbray Early Career Research Award from the US Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association.
Taxonomy Workgroup Biographies
Melinda J. Beeuwkes Buntin, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine. She previously served as deputy assistant director for health at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), where she was responsible for managing and directing studies of health care and health care financing issues in the Health, Retirement, and Long-term Analysis Division. Prior to joining CBO, Dr. Buntin worked at the Office of the National
Coordinator for Health IT, where she established and directed the economic analysis, evaluation, and modeling group while on leave from RAND. At RAND, Dr. Buntin served as deputy director of RAND Health’s Economics, Financing, and Organization Program, director of Public Sector Initiatives for RAND Health, and codirector of the Bing Center for Health Economics. Her research at RAND focused on insurance benefit design, health insurance markets, provider payment, and the care use and needs of the elderly. She has an AB from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and a PhD in health policy with a concentration in economics from Harvard University.
Dave A. Chokshi, MD, MSc, is an assistant vice president at the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation—the largest public health care system in the United States—where he leads the Office of Ambulatory Care Transformation. He practices primary care (internal medicine) at Bellevue Hospital and is an assistant professor of population health and medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. Previously, Dr. Chokshi was director of population health improvement at NYU Langone. In 2012–2013, he served as a White House fellow at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, where he was the principal health adviser in the Office of the Secretary. His prior work experience spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including positions with the New York City and State Departments of Health, the Louisiana Department of Health, a start-up clinical software company, and the nonprofit Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), where he was a founding member of the board of directors. Dr. Chokshi has written on medicine and public health in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, Health Affairs, and Science. He has also contributed to The Atlantic and Scientific American. He serves on the board of Advisors for the Parkland Health & Hospital System. In 2015, Dr. Chokshi was elected a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in 2016, he was elected a fellow of the American College of Physicians. He trained in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he practiced primary care at the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, and he was a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School. During his training, he did clinical work in Guatemala, Peru, Botswana, Ghana, and India. He received his MD with Alpha Omega Alpha distinction from Penn, an MSc in global public health as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude from Duke.
Henry Claypool, policy director, Community Living Policy Center, University of California, San Francisco, having sustained a spinal cord injury in a snow skiing accident in college, has spent his career advocating for the rights and needs
of people living with disabilities. Most recently, he served as the executive vice president of The American Association of People with Disabilities. He was also the senior advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services where he was a principal architect of the administration’s efforts to expand access to community living services, which culminated in the creation of the Administration for Community Living. He served as a commissioner on the 2013 Commission on Long-Term Care.
David A. Dorr, MD, MS, serves as professor and vice chair of medical informatics for the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology as well as a professor of general internal medicine/geriatrics at Oregon Health & Science University. Broadly, Dr. Dorr’s interests lie in care management, coordination of care, collaborative care, chronic disease management, quality, and the requirements of clinical information systems to improve and support these areas. His current primary concentrations are Transforming Outcomes for Patients through Medical home Evaluation & re-Design, or TOPMED (funded by The Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation), Risk Stratification in Primary Care (funded by The Commonwealth Fund and AHRQ), and further dissemination and evaluation of the Care Management Plus project (initially funded by The John A. Hartford Foundation). Dr. Dorr is interested in policy and payment reforms to help provide better-coordinated patient-centered care and support efficiency in the health care system. He was chosen as the New Investigator of the Year by the American Medical Informatics Association in 2007. Dorr earned his BA in economics and his MD from Washington University in St. Louis. He then completed internal medicine residency at Oregon Health & Science University, and earned an MA in medical informatics and health services administration from the University of Utah.
David Labby, MD, PhD, was the founding chief medical officer of Health Share of Oregon, a Coordinated Care Organization (CCO) that is financially and clinically accountable for the physical, behavioral, and dental care of 260,000 Medicaid enrollees in the tri-county region around Portland, Oregon. He was at Health Share from 2012, when CCOs were launched as the key element in the state’s health care transformation efforts, until retiring in July 2015. He continues to work with Health Share as their health strategy adviser as well as consulting with other CCOs. Before coming to Health Share, Dr. Labby was medical director for CareOregon, the state’s largest Medicaid Managed Care Plan. While at CareOregon, he was responsible for developing and overseeing the health plan’s care management program for members with complex conditions.
Starting in 2006, he initiated and led the plan’s Primary Care Renewal initiative to support key network providers in moving to a “medical home” model of care that includes integrated behavioral health. Dr Labby directed Health Share’s “Health Commons” program, a 3-year federally funded Innovations Grant initiative focused on creating a regional system of care for high- needs/high- cost individuals. Dr. Labby is a general internist who practiced in primary care and was medical director in both primary care and multi-specialty settings before coming to CareOregon in 2000. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology.
Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, is director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Mount Sinai Health System. His work combines systems engineering and social mobilization principles, with an emphasis on how the US health care system can learn from other industries and low-resource settings to improve health and health care. He cofounded the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign, an initiative of the African Union and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This inspired the launch of City Health Works, a Harlem-based social enterprise that develops scalable health coaching services for high- need patients, of which he is the founding technical adviser. In 2016, his Arnhold Institute team, in partnership with the UN Secretary General Special Envoy’s Office, planned to launch the Health Equity Atlas of Africa, an open framework to drive collaboration among data scientists, health system experts, and frontline health workers.
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