Dr. Paul Batalden is Professor of Pediatrics and Community Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School; and is Director, Health Care Improvement Leadership Development at the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences. In his capacity as Director of the Center, Dr. Batalden leads the creation and delivery of educational opportunities for physicians from medical school through mid-career. He also works with the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to accelerate the improvement of care for patients. He was Founding Chair of the Board of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Dr. Don Berwick is President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Dr. Berwick is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School. He is Chair of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, as well as an elected member of the Institute of Medicine. He was instrumental in the creation of both IOM reports, To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm. Dr. Berwick was Vice Chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force from 1990 through 1996, and also served as a member of the Panel of Judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. One of the world’s leading authorities on health care quality, Dr. Berwick has published over 100 scientific articles and books on the subject.
Dr. Tina Castañares is a practicing family physician, health care administrator and private consultant with a special interest in the uninsured and underserved. A staff physician at Providence Hood River Memorial Hospital and Medical Director of La Clinica del Cariño Family Health Care Center in Hood River, Oregon, she was one of the original eleven members of the Oregon Health Services Commission. Dr. Castañares helped to formulate the prioritized list of health services, which was central to the Oregon Plan for health care rationing and reform. She is a National Ombudswomen for Migrant Health to the Director of the U.S. Bureau of Primary Health Care (HRSA), and serves on numerous work groups, task forces, national and regional boards and councils.
Dr. Carolyn M. Clancy serves as Director, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Dr. Clancy is a general internist and health services researcher, and a graduate of Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Following clinical training in internal medicine, Dr. Clancy was a Henry Kaiser Family Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond prior to joining AHRQ (then named the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research) in 1990. She holds an academic appointment at George Washington University School of Medicine (Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Medicine) and serves as Senior Associate Editor, Health Services Research.
Dr. Janet Corrigan is the President and CEO of the National Quality Forum which announced in February 2006 its merger with the National Committee for Quality Health Care. Dr. Corrigan was the former Director of the Board on Health Care Services at the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which is responsible for projects relating to health care quality, safety, insurance and benefits coverage, organization, delivery and financing. Dr. Corrigan was also the Director of IOM’s Quality Initiative, an IOM-wide initiative designed to provide leadership, a strategic direction and analytic tools that will contribute to a threshold improvement in quality over the next decade.
Dr. Charles Francis is President of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a private academic institution located in South Central Los Angeles. Prior to his present position, he served as Professor of Clinical Medicine, College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, and Chairman of the Dept. of Medicine at the Harlem Hospital Center. He was Principal Investigator of the Urban Health Institute at Harlem Hospital Center, an outcomes and medical effectiveness research project in minority populations funded by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Dr. Howard Hiatt is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Senior Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. During the course of his long and distinguished career, he was the first Hermann L. Blumgart Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Physician-in-Chief at Beth Israel Hospital. He also served as Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1972 to 1984.
Dr. Brent James is Vice President, Medical Research and Continuing Medical Education at Intermountain Health Care (IHC). He is also Executive Director of the IHC Institute for Health Care Delivery Research, which trains community physician leaders, clinical team members and administrators to conduct state-of-the-art practice improvement projects utilizing quality improvement methods to manage and integrate clinical processes. He is an adjunct professor in the Departments of Medical Informatics and Family and Preventive Medicine, University Of Utah School of Medicine, and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr James is also a member of the IOM Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, which produced the reports -- To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm.
Dr. David Lansky is the Senior Director, Health Program and Executive Director, Personal Health Technology Initiative. Prior to this position, Dr. Lansky served as FACCT's president from its inception in 1995. For more than twenty years, Lansky has been a proponent of a more responsive and accountable health care system. He is a nationally recognized expert in accountability and quality measurement and, as a result, has served as a board member or advisor to numerous health care projects and programs. Some of these include the National Quality Forum, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, National Patient Safety Foundation, The Leapfrog Group, and President Bush's 2002 Economic Forum.
Dr. David Leach is Executive Director of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). The mission of ACGME is to improve the quality of health care in the United States by ensuring and improving the quality of graduate education experiences for physicians in training. The ACGME establishes national standards for graduate medical education by which it approves and continually assesses educational programs under its aegis. It seeks to use the most effective methods available to evaluate the quality of graduate medical education programs. It strives to improve evaluation methods and processes that are valid, fair, open, and ethical. Dr. Leach previously served as director of medical education at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan.
Dr. Kate Lorig is the Director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center. Dr. Lorig is a Professor of Medicine in the Stanford School of Medicine. She earned her bachelors degree in nursing at Boston University, and her masters and doctorate of public health in health education at the University of California, Berkeley. She came to Stanford in 1979 while a graduate student at Cal to develop and research an educational program that emphasized self-help skills for people with arthritis. This program became the Arthritis Self-Help Course, which is now offered to thousands of people with arthritis around the world, and was the prototype for the Chronic Disease Self-Management Program, the Positive Self-Management Program for HIV/AIDS, the Back Pain Self-Management Program, and others.
Dr. Joseph Newhouse is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, Director of the Division of Health Policy Research Education, Chair of the Committee on Higher Degrees in Health Policy, and Director of the Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy. He is a member of the faculties of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic research. He received B.A. and PhD degrees in Economics from Harvard. Dr. Newhouse spent the first twenty years of his career at RAND, where he designed and directed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, a project that ran from 1971 to 1988 and that studied the consequences of different ways of financing medical services.
Dr. Shelia Ryan is Professor and the Charlotte Peck Lienemann and Distinguished Alumni Chair and Director of International Programs in nursing at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Nursing in Omaha, NE. Dr. Ryan serves on the governing board of AIHA, the American International Health Alliance, Inc. and recently completed board service for the IHI, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and the Robert Wood Johnson/Institute of Medicine Health Policy Fellow Selection Committee. She is a fellow of the Academy of Nursing and a member of the Institute of Medicine. During her twenty-two years as a nursing dean, Dr. Ryan served various nursing organizations and foundations. Dr. Ryan earned her B.S.N. from the University of Nebraska (1969), her M.S.N. in Psychiatric Nursing from the University of California, San Francisco (1971), and her Ph.D. in clinical nursing research from the University of Arizona (1981).
Mr. Pete Velez is a senior executive with demonstrated achievement in health care management, and has been a longstanding proponent of quality health care for all New Yorkers. He has had a 27-year career with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC). During that time he has kept pace with the changes in the health care industry, and assisted the organization in positioning itself to be competitive with other providers. Mr. Velez has served as the HHC Senior Vice President for Queens Health Network, consisting of Elmhurst Hospital Center and Queens Hospital Center, since 1994.
Dr. Ed Wagner is a general internist/epidemiologist and Director of the W.A. MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation at the Center for Health Studies, Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. He is also Professor of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine. He directs Improving Chronic Illness Care (ICIC), a national program that assists health systems improve their care of chronic illness through quality improvement and evaluation, research and dissemination. More than 500 American and international health care organizations have been involved in ICIC-guided quality improvement programs.