Appendix C
Speaker Biographical Sketches
William R. Calnon, D.D.S., who practices general dentistry in Rochester, New York, is president of the American Dental Association (ADA). Dr. Calnon’s previous responsibilities with the ADA include serving as the 2nd district trustee to the board of trustees as well as a four-year term on the Council on Dental Practice. He is past president of the New York State Dental Association, the Seventh District Dental Society, and the Monroe County Dental Society. He served on the New York State Board of Dentistry and was an examiner for the Northeast Board of Dental Examiners. In addition, he is a fellow of the American College of Dentists, the International College of Dentists, and the Pierre Fauchard Academy. Dr. Calnon graduated magna cum laude from the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University and received his dental degree from the SUNY at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine.
Debra Dever, chief executive officer of the Loudoun Community Health Center (LCHC), has over 35 years of experience in health care, with 15 years in executive positions in a variety of settings, including acute care, home health care, rehabilitation, and primary care. She has a master’s degree in nursing service administration and a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She has a multicultural background, including having lived in four foreign countries: Mexico, India, Spain, and Israel. Most recently, prior to coming to LCHC Ms. Dever was the executive director of Benewah Medical and Wellness Center, an award-winning tribally owned Federally
Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Northern Idaho for 7 1/2 years. Ms. Dever was responsible for putting together LCHC from scratch. Since seeing its first patients in May 2007, LCHC has cared for over 10,000 patients and grown from a staff of 5 to a staff of 50.
Cynthia Horton has served as the director of development for the Visiting Nurse Association (VNA) of El Paso for the last 9 years. Her responsibilities include raising money, writing grants, and building awareness for charitable health care for those who are uninsured, underinsured, or indigent. She raises awareness and money for the medically homebound who, without these funds, would be unable to receive the care they need. VNA is the only not-for-profit home health care agency in El Paso and provides over $400,000 for charitable services each year.
Having been a foster parent for 17 years, she is still very involved in training and informal presentations regarding foster care, and she presents information to the community on a variety of topics. She volunteers with different organizations and serves on several local boards. Her community involvement includes the El Paso Center for Children and El Paso Families Project, the Habitat for Humanity board of directors, YWCA del Norte Region board member, the YWCA children’s advisory committee, the Better Business Bureau board of directors, the Computer Career Center advisory board, and the Executive Forum, and she is a Women’s Fund of El Paso Fortune 400 Member.
Isabel V. Hoverman, M.D., MACP, is a board-certified internist in private practice in Austin, Texas. She has served on the board of directors of the American College of Physicians Foundation, a health literacy organization, and the board of regents of the American College of Physicians. She is chair of the board of commissioners of The Joint Commission and a member of the board of directors of The Joint Commission International, organizations whose mission is to improve the quality and safety of health care in the United States and internationally through evaluation, accreditation, and education services. She is a member of the State Review Program Committee (SRPC) of the Texas Medical Foundation, the quality improvement organization for Texas that contracts with the Center for Medicare Services to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of services delivered to Medicare beneficiaries in Texas. The SRCP reviews patient complaints and meets with physicians and hospitals where quality or utilization problems have been identified in order to develop individual and systems-based approaches to correct and improve care at the physician and institutional level.
Dr. Hoverman helped establish the General Internal Medicine Statewide Preceptorship Program, which places first-year medical students
from eight Texas medical schools in practicing internists’ offices. She is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
Debra Keller, M.D., M.P.H., is a graduate of Barnard College, received her medical degree from University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and completed her master’s of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she worked with Dr. Rima Rudd in the design of an educational module on health literacy for the Department of Veterans Affairs and carried out institutional assessments of the health literacy environments in public and private hospitals. She is currently a senior internal medicine resident in the San Francisco General Primary Care Program at University of California, San Francisco.
Shari Ling, M.D., serves as a medical officer in the Office of Clinical Standards at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and is currently serving as the acting deputy chief medical officer. In addition to supporting the work of quality measurement nursing homes, home health agencies, End-Stage Renal Disease Network, and, more recently, the development of measures for new quality-reporting programs in inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care acute hospitals, and hospices, she has also been the lead coordinator and facilitator of the monthly Office of Clinical Standards and Quality measures forum. Dr. Ling represents CMS on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) multiple chronic conditions workgroup and on the post-acute-care/long-term-care workgroup of the National Quality Forum’s Measures Application Partnership. She also leads the measures and data sources sub-workgroup for the HHS Action Plan for HAI Prevention in Long-Term Care Facilities and leads the clinical sub-group for the National Alzheimer’s Project Act.
Dr. Ling is a rheumatologist and geriatrician who received her medical training at Georgetown University School of Medicine, where she graduated as a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society. She received her clinical training in internal medicine and rheumatology at Georgetown University Medical Center, followed by geriatric medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She remained on faculty at Johns Hopkins for 5 years, after which she worked for 8 years in the intramural research program of the National Institutes of Health in the National Institute on Aging as a staff clinician studying human aging and age-associated chronic diseases with attention to musculoskeletal conditions and mobility function. She continues to serve as a part-time faculty member in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and in the Division of Rheumatology, Allergy, and Clinical Immunology at the University of Maryland and enjoys seeing
patients on a voluntary basis through the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Baltimore. She is a also a gerontologist who received her training in direct service from the Ethel Percy Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, later serving as the codirector of the Andrus Older Adult Counseling Center.
John Neuberger is director of client partnerships at Quad/Graphics and is responsible for the contracting and ongoing relationships with all health care partners that serve the needs of Quad/Graphics’ 20,000 employees throughout the United States.
Mr. Neuberger brings more than 35 years of health care experience to his position. Before assuming his current position, he served as vice president of operations of QuadMed for 8 years. This is a wholly owned subsidiary of Quad/Graphics that manages onsite clinics throughout the country. Mr. Neuberger had been with QuadMed for 15 years.
Prior to joining QuadMed, Mr. Neuberger served as regional vice president of physician integration with Covenant Healthcare for more than 7 years. He also served as president of Covenant Medical Group, an 82-physician multi-specialty group located in the Milwaukee area.
Mr. Neuberger received his bachelor’s degree from St. Francis Seminary, Milwaukee, and his master’s degree in health services administration from St. Francis University in Joliet, Illinois.
Ana Pujols-McKee, M.D., is the executive vice president and chief medical officer of The Joint Commission. In this role Dr. McKee represents The Joint Commission enterprise as she focuses on and develops policies and strategies for promoting patient safety and quality improvement in health care. Her responsibilities include providing support to The Joint Commission’s Patient Safety Advisory Group; overseeing work related to the development of the Sentinel Event Policy, National Patient Safety Goals, and Sentinel Event Alerts; supervising the Sentinel Event Database; and overseeing the functions of the Standards Interpretation Group and the Office of Quality Monitoring. Dr. McKee also provides clinical guidance and support to the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, Joint Commission Resources, and Joint Commission International.
Prior to her current position, Dr. McKee served as the chief medical officer and associate executive director at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System, and as a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She also served as the medical director for the Philadelphia Health Department’s freestanding health centers.
Dr. McKee is a former board member of the American Cancer Society, the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, Health Partners
Philadelphia, and Philadelphia AIDS Consortium and is the former board chair for the Pennsylvania Safety Authority and vice chair for the Public Health Management Corporation. Dr. McKee also sits on the board of Quality Insights of Pennsylvania. In addition, she served on the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee and on several committees of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. McKee holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital in Philadelphia. She completed her residency at Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia and is board certified in internal medicine. Dr. McKee participated as an affiliate member of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and concentrated her studies in health care administration in a nondegree program at the Wharton School.
Dean Schillinger, M.D., is professor of medicine in residence at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and chief of the UCSF division of general internal medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). He is a practicing primary care physician at SFGH, an urban public hospital, where he sees patients, teaches in the primary care residency program, and conducts research. In his prior administrative roles, he has directed the Medi-Cal managed care clinic at SFGH and the general medicine clinic at SFGH and has been the director of clinical operations for the Department of Medicine. Dr. Schillinger also serves as chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health.
Author of over 130 scientific manuscripts, Dr. Schillinger carries out research related to health care for vulnerable populations and is an internationally recognized expert in health communication science. His work focuses on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management. He has carried out a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on the care of patients with diabetes and heart disease and has developed and evaluated communication programs tailored to the literacy and language needs of patients with chronic disease. He has been the recipient of research grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the California Endowment, the Commonwealth Fund, and the California Health Care Foundation. He has been honored with the 2003 Institute for Healthcare Advancement Research Award, the 2008 Research Award in Safety and Quality from the National Patient Safety Foundation, the 2009 Engel Award in Health Communication Research, and the California Association of Public Hospital Quality Leaders Award for this work. He was a coinvestigator for the
National Association of Public Health and Hospital Institute’s Diabetes Quality Improvement Consortium.
Dr. Schillinger is the founding director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations (CVP), whose mission is to carry out innovative research to prevent and treat chronic disease in populations for whom social conditions often conspire to both promote chronic disease and make its management more challenging. CVP is based within the UCSF’s department of medicine, located on the campus of San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, the public health hospital of the city and county of San Francisco. CVP has distinguished itself as a practice-based research center whose work has helped translate research into community and public health practice as well as to infuse local practice back into research. CVP faculty members have coordinated eight randomized trials in community settings. Beyond the local communities it serves, CVP is nationally and internationally known for its research in health communication and health policy to reduce health disparities, with special expertise in the social determinants of health, including literacy, food policy, poverty, and minority status, as well as with a focus on the clinical conditions of pre-diabetes, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, including hypertension, chronic kidney disease and heart failure. Dr. Schillinger currently directs the CVP health communications program.
In his capacity as chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health, he has been expanding the program’s work in health communications, social and environmental determinants of diabetes, and health disparities. In this capacity he has partnered with Youth Speaks, a youth empowerment organization that harnesses social media, to advance a California diabetes prevention initiative. Dr. Schillinger is also principal investigator, along with the Kaiser Division of Research, for the UCSF component of a P30 Center for Type 2 Diabetes Translational Research recently funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
Dr. Schillinger has a strong commitment and outstanding track record of training fellows and junior faculty and has been the primary or secondary mentor for 10 K level career development award recipients. He was awarded the 2010 Outstanding Bay Area Clinical Research Mentor Prize by the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, the Kaiser Division of Research, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute, and Genentech. He was the first health communication scientist to receive this award. Dr. Schillinger contributed to the 2004 Institute of Medicine report on health literacy, is a section editor for the textbooks Understanding Health Literacy (AMA press) and Caring for Vulnerable and Underserved Populations (Lange series/McGraw Hill, 2007), is a member of the American College of Physicians’ health communication advisory board, and serves on the
editorial board of the journal Patient Education and Counseling. In 2000 he completed an Open Society Institute Advocacy Fellowship working with California Literacy, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization that helps people gain literacy skills, to advance the California Health Literacy Initiative. With respect to chronic disease control on the global level, he recently returned from a semester as visiting scholar at the University of Chile’s School of Public Health to help develop chronic disease prevention and treatment initiatives and has served as a consultant to the National Health Group in Singapore and the Scotland Department of Health on chronic disease and health promotion initiatives.
Darren Townzen is currently the director of health and wellness systems for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. In 1988 he received a bachelor of science degree from the Southwestern Oklahoma State University School of Pharmacy, and in 2006 he earned a masters of business administration from Webster University. In 1989 he started work for the Wal-Mart Stores pharmacy division as a pharmacist in east Texas before coming into the general office in 1995 for other responsibilities. Current responsibilities include prescription insurance connectivity, billing standards, prescription monitoring programs, and electronic prescribing. He has been a member of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs since 2005 and is active in Work Group 2 Product Identification and Work Group 9 Government Programs, where he is currently serving in the role as a standardization cochair and a member of the board of trustees.
Ross Wilson, M.D., is senior vice president and chief medical officer at the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation. As chief medical officer at the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation, Dr. Wilson has oversight of clinical care delivery at 11 teaching hospitals, 6 diagnostic and treatment centers, 80 community clinics, and 4 long-term care facilities which provide care to more than 1.3 million patients annually. The system also includes the MetroPlus health plan and a home care service. Prior to taking on this role at the largest municipal public health system in the United States, Dr. Wilson was the director of the Centre for Healthcare Improvement in the Northern Sydney Central Coast Health Service in Australia. In addition he has had many leadership, board, and management roles in Australian and international public health systems.
Dr. Wilson was the chairman of the strategic advisory board for the International Forum for Quality and Safety in Health Care and international advisor to the Australian Commission for Safety and Quality in Health Care until July 2009. As leader of the Quality in Australian Health Care Study (1993–1995) and, more recently, the Eastern Mediterranean and African regional study of patient safety in developing economies for
the World Health Organization (WHO) from 2005 to 2008, Dr. Wilson has a long research and publication experience in the epidemiology of patient safety. Since 1999 his key interests have been leadership, training, and project support for clinical improvement through the Clinical Practice Improvement program and its associated projects.
At a strategic level, Dr. Wilson has been a member of the WHO World Alliance for Patient Safety Expert Advisory Group, a contributor to the WHO Patient Safety Research Council, a member of the WHO International Steering Committee for Patient Safety Solutions, a member of the Asia–Pacific Regional Council for Joint Commission International, and a member of the editorial board of the British Medical Journal.
Until 2005 Dr. Wilson had a clinical role as senior specialist in intensive care medicine at Royal North Shore Hospital, a teaching hospital of the University of Sydney.
