Expanding Our View and Zooming In: What We Can Learn About Healthcare in Our Backyard and Around the World.
Opening Remarks: Danielle Thompson, MPP, President and Executive Board Chair, BYHP
Keynote: Dr. Gary Gottlieb
Keynote: Dr. Gary Gottlieb
Gary Gottlieb is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
From 2015 through June of 2019, he served as CEO of Partners In Health, a global NGO providing a preferential option for the poor in health care in severely resource constrained settings. He assumed this role after serving on the PIH Board of Directors for a decade.
From 2010 until February of 2015, Dr. Gottlieb was the CEO of Partners HealthCare (now MassGeneral Brigham), the parent of the Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals, the largest health care delivery organization in New England and among the largest biomedical research and training enterprises in the US. From 2002-2009, he was President of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Previously, he served as President of North Shore Medical Center and as Chair of Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health System.
Dr. Gottlieb served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 2012-2016 and as its chair from 2016-2018. From 2006-2016, he was Chair of the Boston Private Industry Council, the workforce board of the City of Boston.
Prior to coming to Boston, Dr. Gottlieb spent 15 years in positions of increasing leadership in health care in Philadelphia. He established the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center’s first program in geriatric psychiatry and developed it into a nationally recognized research, training, and clinical program. He served as executive vice-chair of psychiatry and associate dean for managed care at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, and as director and CEO of Friends Hospital, the nation’s first freestanding psychiatric hospital.
Dr. Gottlieb is currently an Executive Partner at Flare Capital Partners, a Boston venture firm investing in early stage health related technology companies. He serves on the boards of health tech firms OM1, Kyruus and Cohere and hospital services company Agiliti. He is a corporate advisor to Temasek, the sovereign investment fund of Singapore.
Dr. Gottlieb received a B.Sc. cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.D. from Albany Medical College in a six-year accelerated program and he completed a psychiatry residency at New York University/Bellevue Medical Center. As a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Penn, he earned an M.B.A. with distinction from Wharton.
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Panel 1 – Improving Access to Behavioral Health Care: Addressing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), Cultural and Linguistic Needs of Individuals
Moderator: Christie Hager, JD, MPH
Christie Hager, JD, MPH
Christie Hager, a public health lawyer, is Managing Director of Public & Private Health Solutions at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Commonwealth Medicine. She oversees a team of experts who partner with public and private health and human services entities with a focus on heath law, policy and program development, and research & evaluation. She is currently engaged full time, on an interim basis, as Director of Behavioral Health of the MassHealth program in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services.
Before joining Commonwealth Medicine, Hager was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as the Regional Director of Region I of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she oversaw the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the six New England states from 2010-2014. Prior to her service in the Obama Administration, she was Chief Health Counsel to the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives during the development, drafting, and first three years of implementation of the Massachusetts health reform law enacted in 2006. She also previously served in senior executive roles at Beacon Health Options, a national managed behavioral health organization. Christie’s first post-graduate position was Research Assistant to the editorial leadership at the New England Journal of Medicine; she has held research and operations positions at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Division of Public Health Practice, and at the Schneider Institute for Health Policy at Brandeis University’s Heller School, where she was appointed the first Senior Fellow.
Hager has held appointments on the faculties of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Suffolk University Law School. Her work has appeared in such publications as the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Law and Medicine, and Journal of Legal Medicine. Hager has served as Chair of the American Public Health Association’s Health Law Forum, President of the Massachusetts Public Health Association, and Co-Chair of the Health Law Section of the Boston Bar Association.
Hager holds an A.B. from Smith College, a M.P.H. from the Boston University School of Public Health, and a J.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Law.
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Valeria Chambers, EdM, CAS, CPS
Valeria Chambers, EdM, CAS, CPS
Using her lived experience as a Certified Peer Specialist in mental health recovery, Valeria works as a Peer Consultant at the Center of Excellence for Psychosocial and Systemic Research, Massachusetts General Hospital and at the Health Equity Research Lab, Cambridge Health Alliance. She has worked extensively with researchers and policy makers on projects addressing mechanisms underlying mental health care disparities in underserved communities for the past 7 years while also looking at how to better implement & provide access to trauma informed, culturally responsive services in peer support. She is the founder and lead organizer of Blacks Voices: Pathways4Recovery, a state-wide advocacy and leadership support network for Blacks and African Americans. During COVID 19 Valeria has enjoyed taking workshops in Digital Peer Support and GPS Group Peer Support in order to bring peer support to more people during these difficult times. She is part of the GPS virtual affinity support group for Black community leaders in the US, Canada and the Caribbean and is a Solidarity Group facilitator for a 4 week GPS course entitled “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump”. In working with her own wellness & recovery process, Valeria loves sipping tea curled up with a good book, practicing the 8 Limbs of Yoga, going for long walks, playing with friends with fur & looking for fun ways to tone the vagus nerve.
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Marian Girouard-Spino, RN, MSN, CCM
Marian Girouard-Spino, RN, MSN, CCM
Marian Girouard Spino is the Chief System Integration and Quality Officer at Aspire Health Alliance where she leads the organization in defining quality of care and oversees clinical integration efforts across the South Shore. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Boston College and a Masters in Nursing as a Family Nurse Practitioner from UNC-Chapel Hill where she was a Johnston Scholar. Marian has held varied nursing and hospital leadership positions prior to coming to Aspire. Her last acute care position was as the Director of Care Integration at BID-Milton Hospital where she led the HPC CHART II effort to improve BH care in the ED and reduce BH patient boarding hours. Marian is a member of Sigma Theta Tau, the International Honor Society of Nursing.
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Nancy Norman, MD, MPH
Nancy Norman, MD, MPH
Nancy Norman, a native Bostonian, is the Medical Director of Integration for the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Partnership, a Beacon Health Options Company (MBHP/Beacon). She has served in this role for seven years focusing mainly on working with city and state public health officials, medical providers, consumer advocates and business leaders, to improve health outcomes by working to improve health care systems. She brings a keen appreciation of the interdependency of medical, behavioral and social dimensions of health to a career spent implementing actionable, practical strategies for health improvement and system redesign. The major focus of her work is to look at ways to better integrate behavioral health with primary care, partly by focusing on payment reform and health system redesign efforts.
Prior to joining MBHP/Beacon she was the Chief Medical Officer for the Boston Public Health Commission, the health department for the City of Boston. In this capacity she oversaw the clinical functions of the Commission and developed initiatives to address emerging health problems. One of her major responsibilities was the supervision of the Infectious Disease Bureau, which included the HIV/AIDs Services Division. This division was the grantee for the Ryan White Part A dollars that continue to support the collaborative/integrated approach to care for residents of the City of Boston living with HIV. Nine years as a primary HIV care provider and Director of Women’s Health at Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, made transition to this more population-focused work with HIV an exciting challenge.
Dr. Norman was also instrumental in the restructuring of the health disparities work to realign the focus on health equity and social justice. Dr. Norman completed her internship and residency, including chief residency in internal medicine at Faulkner Hospital after receiving a BA in biology from Bowdoin College and a MD from Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Norman later received a MPH from Harvard University School of Public Health and completed a clinical fellowship in Community Oriented Primary Care/Preventive Medicine at Carney Hospital. She is currently on staff at Boston Medical Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Boston University. Dr. Norman is tremendously effective at building coalitions, sustaining relationships, and masterfully exerting influence to effect change.
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Arielle Rosner, LCSW
Arielle Rosner, LCSW
Ari is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who joined Cityblock in 2017 as a part of the founding team. It was an opportunity for her to help to build a truly integrated, team-based care model for a population she cares about deeply.
Previously, she directed the Mount Sinai Health Home Serving Adults and Children, a large organization comprising contracted community-based care management agencies that provide comprehensive care management services to New York State Medicaid recipients who are chronically ill and experience many social complexities in their daily lives.
Prior to this position, she worked at Mount Sinai Hospital as a Renal Transplant Social Worker, evaluating patients for transplant from a psychosocial perspective and following them through the process for all support needs. Ari has a B.A. from Brandeis University, received her M.S.W. from Columbia, and was faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter. She loves to travel, eat, and has yet to meet a beach she didn’t like.
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Panel 2 – Defining Success in Reimbursement Models: How to Align Incentives to Improve Outcomes in Different Healthcare Systems
Moderator: Tal Gross, PhD
Tal Gross, PhD
Tal Gross is an Associate Professor in the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. His research focuses on health insurance and consumer finance. His current work studies the Affordable Care Act and its likely consequences. Professor Gross holds an AB in economics, statistics, and mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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James Colbert, MD
James Colbert, MD
Dr. James Colbert is senior medical director for delivery system innovation and analytics at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. He is the clinical leader for provider analytics and provider performance support.
Prior to joining BCBSMA, he served as the vice president of population health for Benevera Health, a joint venture between Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and four health delivery systems in New Hampshire. Other experiences include serving as senior medical director for population health at Verisk Health and serving as a core faculty member of the Brookings Institution ACO Learning Network. He was the lead author of a 2014 Brookings Institution report entitled Adopting Accountable Care: An Implementation Guide for Physician Practices.
He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and medical degree from Stanford University. He completed a primary care internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as a fellowship in medical research and health policy at the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Colbert maintains an active clinical practice, and he holds faculty appointments at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Ariadne Labs, and Harvard Medical School. In 2015 he was selected by MedTech Boston as one of 40 healthcare innovators under age 40. He lives in Newton, Mass. with his wife and children.
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Aditya Mahalingam-Dhingra, MPH
Aditya Mahalingam-Dhingra, MPH
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Sarah Sabshon, MPH
Sarah Sabshon, MPH
Sarah Sabshon serves as the Healthcare Policy Advisor for Massachusetts House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo. She previously served as Chief of Staff for State Representative Jeffrey Sánchez, during his appointment as House Chair of the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing. Sarah began her career at the State House as a research analyst for the Joint Committee on Public Health. In her various roles, a variety of healthcare policy issues, including hospital financing and provider price variation, tobacco regulation, pharmaceutical pricing, Medicaid managed care, opioid and substance use disorders, women’s health, compounding pharmacy standards, violence prevention, and long-term care. She has also done some work in education and housing policy. Before her time in the legislature, Sarah worked for several years in healthcare policy consulting. She is also a former ORISE Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sarah holds an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health and a BA with honors in Public Health and Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University.
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Aaron Wurst, MBA
Aaron Wurst, MBA
Aaron is the Senior Director of our Pharmacy Strategy and Innovation group where he leads a number of teams responsible for both top and bottom-line pharmacy growth, ensuring near-term results so that we can plan for the future.
In that capacity he leads our Portfolio Optimization team, responsible for expense and capital management, disruption excellence and recently script FP&A; Strategy and Business Development, with a focus on reimbursement and real estate strategy, the Design and Innovation Lab that incubates products and acts as a shared service to turn business problems into opportunities; and our Strategic Operations and Business Insights group that provides insights across the broader pharmacy growth organization, including recently taking on the development of the pharmacy operating income infrastructure.
Aaron began his career as a management consultant in 2007. In 2009, he helped start the enterprise strategy team at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island where he developed and led a number of initiatives, including preparing the organization for the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, Aaron joined the Retail Strategic Product Development Group where he built the business case for the Unlocking Adherence initiative, resulting in the implementation of Script Sync, Multi-Dose Packaging and our innovative label solution. Aaron was the one of the first recipients of CVS’s graduate degree sponsorship program and went to business school from 2013-2015. He spent a summer in CVS’s public policy team in Washington D.C as part of that program. Upon his return, Aaron joined the Enterprise Strategy team where he helped build the initial strategic imperative for our acquisition of Aetna and led strategic work to ensure retail pharmacy’s response to new disruptive threats. He returned to the retail pharmacy business unit and began his current role in 2017.
Aaron earned a BS in Applied Physics from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Aaron and his wife Lindsay have two daughters, Emmeline (4) and Eleanor (2).
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Panel 3 – Healthcare in a Technological Era: Making Boston’s Backyard Even Bigger
Moderator: Robert Schultz, MBA
Robert Schultz, MBA
Robert Schultz is Managing Director of Massnex using science diplomacy to work across global industry, academia, and government stakeholders to facilitate patient innovation and support the strategic economic growth initiatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the founding Innovation Officer for the Town of Randolph and was instrumental in building a strong ecosystem in one of the Commonwealth’s most diverse municipalities. He guided Aware Engineering as CEO through the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s MassCONNECT program where he learned the best practices associated with patient-focused product development in collaboration with the cystic fibrosis disease community. Robert has a BS from Northeastern University in International Business and an MBA from University of Massachusetts. He is a Professor of Healthcare Entrepreneurship at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and previously developed the Healthcare Innovation course in the MBA program at University of Massachusetts-Boston.
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Sara DeGregorio
Sara DeGregorio
Sara DeGregorio graduated from the University of Tampa with a Bachelor of Biology and from Suffolk University with a Master of Healthcare Administration. She worked within the Partners Healthcare system (now known as “MassGeneral Brigham”), for over nine years in research management and population health. In 2018, Sara joined the growing Boston-based start-up company Medically Home that, through collaborations with payors and health systems, develops and implements alternative in-home care models across the country, facilitating truly patient centered care across the continuum. With expertise in project management, multidisciplinary collaborations and population-based programming, Sara is passionate about finding economical, innovative ways to keep patients not only healthy, but thriving. In her personal life, she enjoys reading, traveling and spending time with her husband Sergi, son Marc and dog, Lily.
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Debbie Lin, PhD
Debbie Lin, PhD
Dr. Debbie Lin is Executive Director at Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund in the US and leads the Fund’s North American efforts in Digital Healthcare. She joined Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals in 2008. Within Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma, she worked across various regions and divisions. She has worked in Medical Affairs in the area of women’s health and later in Health Economics and Outcomes supporting all commercial product sales with large payers and providers accounts on the West Coast. She also led the US organization’s social entrepreneurship program in Boehringer Ingelheim’s Making More Health collaboration with Ashoka. In 2013, she transitioned to Corporate Headquarters in Germany in Corporate Strategy and Development as Director of Corporate Development. There she was responsible for BI’s global development strategy, leading BI’s global venture into stroke rehabilitation. She led multi-country teams to set up the company’s first stroke rehabilitation centers in Shanghai, China and in Lisbon, Portugal. Prior to Boehringer Ingelheim, she worked as a Public Policy Consultant for Pacific Health Policy Group supporting Medicaid Policy implementation in various states such as Vermont and West Virginia during the Clinton Administration. Her doctorate is in Pharmacogenomics and Bioinformatics from UCSF, she also has a Masters in Engineering from Stanford University and a Masters in Public Policy from UCLA. Debbie is a native Californian, she loves sunshine, being around nature and the ocean, yoga and dogs.
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Claire-Cecile Pierre, MD
Claire-Cecile Pierre, MD
Dr. Claire-Cecile Pierre is the Executive Director of the Kerry Murphy Healey Center for Global Health Entrepreneurship at Babson. Trained in Internal Medicine and Board Certified in Clinical Informatics, Dr. Pierre holds over 15 years of experience in the use of technology to improve the quality of care in the US working in large multi hospital academic health systems and in community health centers. Dr. Pierre also holds decades of experience in global health focusing on health systems strengthening after disasters. She has responded to multiple outbreaks (including HIV, Cholera and Zika) and is now leading the clinical response to COVID 19 as the Chief Medical Officer of Harbor Health Services, a network of 8 clinical sites from Boston to the Cape of MA. She has worked at Partners in Health, the World Bank and is the Director of the Program in Health Systems Strengthening and Social Change at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pierre is exploring the role of targeted investing and entrepreneurship in solving global health challenges.
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Sue Schade, MBA
Sue Schade, MBA
Sue is a Principal at StarBridge Advisors, LLC. A nationally recognized health IT leader, in recent years has served as interim Chief Technology Officer at University of Vermont Health Network, Chief Information Officer at Stony Brook Medicine on Long Island and at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. Prior to StarBridge Advisors, she was a founding advisor at Next Wave Health Advisors.
Sue has more than 30 years’ experience in healthcare information technology management and was recognized as the CHIME-HIMSS John E. Gall, Jr. CIO of the Year in 2014.
Sue served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers from 2012-2015, providing direction and oversight to information technology initiatives and working closely with the CIO for the U-M Medical School. Under her leadership, UMHS made the HealthCare’s Most Wired list in 2015 and achieved the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model Stage 6 in 2014.
For over 12 years, Sue served as Chief Information Officer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Her previous experience included 12 years in positions of increasing responsibility at a large integrated delivery system in the Chicago area. She led the software division for a start-up healthcare software and outsourcing services vendor for several years and worked as a senior manager in the healthcare information technology practice at Ernst and Young.
An active member of HIMSS and CHIME, Sue served on the CHIME Board from 2004 to 2006 and chaired its Education Foundation Board from 2006 to 2009. She served on the HIMSS Advocacy and Public Policy Steering Committee from 2009-2011 as well as the CHIME Policy Steering Committee. Sue achieved fellow status with both HIMSS and CHIME. She is currently serving on the AAMI board as Vice Chair of Health IT.
She is a regular speaker and writer within the HIT industry including a weekly blog called Health IT Connect at www.sueschade.com. She holds an MBA degree from Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle, Illinois.
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Keynote: Dr. Rebecca Weintraub
Keynote: Dr. Rebecca Weintraub
Rebecca Weintraub, MD is the Faculty Director of the Global Health Delivery Project at Harvard University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Weintraub is a practicing internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and serves as an Advisor for the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation.
She has led the research and development of Cases in Global Health Delivery, a collection of over 40 Harvard Business School case studies with Harvard Business Publishing, available online at no cost to the public and taught at over 500 schools of medicine, public health, and business. Her research on value based health care delivery has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Global Fund, World Health Organization, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dr. Weintraub is also the Director of Better Evidence at Ariadne Labs. Better Evidence has partnered with UpToDate, an evidence-based online clinical resource, to award free access to over 20,000 clinicians serving in resource-limited settings in more than150 countries who would not otherwise be able to afford the subscription.
In addition, Rebecca is leading the COVID-19 Global Response work stream at Ariadne Labs. Her portfolio includes new research and content development in vaccine delivery. This includes a new study on the probabilities of the Covid-19 vaccine portfolio success, developing a vaccine index and new content on the interconnectivity of vaccine literacy, allocation, distribution and verification.
Dr. Weintraub graduated from Yale University, Stanford School of Medicine, and completed her medical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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Closing Remarks: Brendan Simonson, Executive Vice Board Chair, BYHP
Special thanks to our
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