Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Workshop Speakers1
Cathy Baase, M.D., FAAFP, FACOEM,†* is the chief health officer for The Dow Chemical Company, with direct responsibility for leadership and management of all occupational health, epidemiology, and health promotion programs and staff around the world. Dr. Baase is a key driver of the Dow health strategy. In combination with her role at Dow, Dr. Baase is active in a number of organizations and associations. She is the chair of the board of directors of the Michigan Health Information Alliance, a multi-stakeholder collaborative dedicated to improving the health of people in 14 counties in central Michigan. Dr. Baase has been a board member of the Partnership for Prevention for more than 10 years. She serves on the board of directors of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative. She is a fellow in the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine and a fellow in the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Jo Ivey Boufford, M.D., is the president of the New York Academy of Medicine and a professor of public service, health policy, and management at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is also a clinical professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine. She served as dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University from June 1997 to November 2002. Prior to that she served as principal deputy assistant secretary for health in
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1 Names appear in alphabetical order; † = member of the workshop planning committee; * = member of the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement.
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from November 1993 to January 1997 and as acting assistant secretary from January 1997 to May 1997. While at HHS, she served as the U.S. representative on the executive board of the World Health Organization from 1994 to 1997. Dr. Boufford currently serves on the boards of the United Hospital Fund, Public Health Solutions, and the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation and chairs the Public Health Committee of the State Public Health and Health Planning Council. She was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1992 and is a member of its Board on Global Health, Board on African Science Academy Development and serves as its foreign secretary. She has received honorary degrees from the State University of New York–Brooklyn, New York Medical College, Pace University, and the University of Toledo. She has been a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine since 1988. Dr. Boufford received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her M.D. with distinction from the University of Michigan Medical School. She is board certified in pediatrics.
Dan Buettner is the founder and chief executive officer of Blue Zones®, a company that puts the world’s best practices in longevity and well-being to work in people’s lives. Mr. Buettner is also a National Geographic Fellow and New York Times best-selling author. His New York Times Sunday Magazine article, “The Island Where People Forget to Die,” was the second most popular article of 2012. Mr. Buettner’s National Geographic cover story on longevity, “The Secrets of Living Longer,” was one of the magazine’s top-selling issues in history and a made him a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His books The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (2008) and Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way (2010) appeared on many best-seller lists and were both featured on Oprah. In 2009 Mr. Buettner and his partner, AARP, applied principles from The Blue Zones to Albert Lea, Minnesota, and successfully raised life expectancy and lowered health care costs by some 40 percent. He is currently working with Healthways to implement the program in three beach cities of Los Angeles; Fort Worth, Texas; and Kauai, Hawaii; and also the entire state of Iowa. Their strategy focuses on optimizing the health environment instead of focusing on individual behavior change. Writing in Newsweek, Harvard University’s Walter Willet called the results “stunning.”
Alex Chan† currently serves as the Orfalea-Brittingham Fellow at the Clinton Foundation’s Health Matters Initiative. Prior to joining the Clinton Foundation, Mr. Chan worked in real estate finance and was the city planner for the City of El Monte, California. He holds a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan and recently completed
graduate degrees in public administration and communications management from the University of Southern California.
Neil Goldfarb is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health. He is also the voice for the Philadelphia region’s employers in working with providers, payers, and other system stakeholders to increase health care quality, safety, efficiency and access to care, and cost reduction. Mr. Goldfarb brings more than 30 years of health care experience to his coalition leadership position. Most recently, as associate dean for research in the Jefferson School of Population Health, he was responsible for developing and carrying out the school’s research agenda, focused on health care quality and value. Concurrently, Mr. Goldfarb serves as director of ambulatory care performance improvement for the Jefferson University Physicians outpatient practices, overseeing the faculty practice plan’s efforts to develop appropriate measures of quality, implement these measures, and develop and evaluate strategies to improve performance. Mr. Goldfarb has authored nearly 60 articles in the peer-reviewed literature covering topics such as health and disease management, quality measurement and improvement in ambulatory and long-term care settings, care for the underserved, and economic evaluation of health care interventions. Since 2004, Mr. Goldfarb has co-directed the College for Value-Based Purchasing of Health Benefits, an innovative national training program for employers. His previous positions include executive director of a quality improvement consulting and data collection firm, and vice president of health services and provider relations for a large Philadelphia Medicaid managed care plan.
Fikry Isaac, M.D., is the vice president of global health services at Johnson & Johnson. In this capacity Dr. Isaac has driven programs at Johnson & Johnson that include the development of health and wellness strategies, policies, guidelines, and services worldwide (occupational medicine, employee assistance program, and wellness). Dr. Isaac’s efforts have been greatly focused on introducing innovative approaches that improve employee health and well-being. Dr. Isaac is a pioneer in the field of workplace health promotion and global health, and he has introduced innovative approaches to improving the health and well-being of populations. He is a published author in this field and continues to do research on population health interventions, using rigorous scientific methods to ensure that these interventions deliver meaningful outcomes. His broad view spans the fields of clinical medicine, behavior change technologies, and economic analyses. Dr. Isaac is an outspoken champion of prevention and health promotion and has achieved remarkable success within Johnson & Johnson, gaining senior management support and funding
for health improvement initiatives for all Johnson & Johnson employees worldwide. In the public sphere, Dr. Isaac has taken part in important public policy discussions and formulations. During the discussion of health care reform in the United States, Dr. Isaac was invited to meet with officials of the Office of Personnel Management and the White House to provide input to a pilot program for health and wellness in the federal workforce. Through his engagement with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Life Science Innovation Forum, he has been instrumental in the development of an action plan that addresses non-communicable diseases for member countries. Dr. Isaac received his medical degree from Ain Shams University Medical School (Cairo, Egypt). He was certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 1991 and earned an M.P.H. in occupational medicine from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2001. He is a fellow of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, where he chairs the Corporate Health Achievement Award. He is also a member of the Gold Standard Task Force–CEO Roundtable on Cancer and is the industry co-chair of the Life Science and Innovation Forum–APEC. He also serves on several boards, including those of the Partnership for Prevention, the Global Business Group on Health, and the Health Enhancement Research Organization.
George Isham, M.D., M.S.,†* is a senior advisor to HealthPartners, responsible for working with the board of directors and the senior management team on health and quality of care improvement for patients, members, and the community. Dr. Isham is also a senior fellow at the HealthPartners Research Foundation and facilitates progress at the intersection of population health research and public policy. Dr. Isham is active nationally and currently co-chairs the National Quality Forum–convened Measurement Application Partnership, chairs the clinical program committee of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and a is member of NCQA’s committee on performance measurement. Dr. Isham is the chair of the IOM’s Roundtable on Health Literacy and has chaired three studies in addition to serving on a number of IOM studies related to health and quality of care. In 2003 Isham was appointed as a lifetime national associate of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his contributions to the work of the IOM. He is a former member of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Task Force on Community Preventive Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and currently serves on the advisory committee to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His practice experience as a general internist was with the U.S. Navy, at the Freeport Clinic in Freeport, Illinois, and as a clinical
assistant professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin.
James Knickman, Ph.D.,†* is the president and chief executive officer of the New York State Health Foundation (NYSHealth), a private foundation dedicated to improving the health of all New Yorkers. Under Dr. Knickman’s leadership, NYSHealth has invested more than $85 million since 2006 in initiatives to improve health care and the public health system in New York State. Today, the foundation focuses its efforts in three priority areas: reducing the number of New Yorkers without health insurance coverage, improving the prevention and management of diabetes, and advance primary care to develop innovative approaches and meet growing demand. Immediately prior to joining the foundation, Dr. Knickman was the vice president of research and evaluation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey. Between 1976 and 1992, he served on the faculty of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; earlier, he worked at the New York City Office of Management and Budget. Dr. Knickman serves as a board member of the Center for Effective Philanthropy in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the National Council on Aging in Washington, DC; and Philanthropy New York, in New York City. He is a past chair of the New Jersey Department of Health’s Cardiac Health Advisory Council, a past board member of AcademyHealth in Washington, DC, a past board member of the New York Catholic Health Care System, and a past board member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health System in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dr. Knickman received a bachelor of arts degree in sociology and psychology from Fordham University and his Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania.
Alisa May, M.A., is the executive director of Priority Spokane, a think tank with the mission of building a culture of health by focusing community attention on the social and economic factors that influence health (www.priorityspokane.org). Priority Spokane is based at Greater Spokane Incorporated (GSI), a merged chamber of commerce and economic development council, and GSI is an active member of Priority Spokane (www.greaterspokane.org). As executive director, Ms. May led a team of community partners through an extensive application process that resulted in one of only 18 awards for the 2012 Roadmaps to Health grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and she is the project manager for that grant. Ms. May also led the year-long, rigorous effort that resulted in Spokane County being named one of six winners nationwide for the 2014 RWJF Culture of Health Prize, which is based on collaborative educational efforts with healthy outcomes (http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-
rwjf/newsroom/features-and-articles/culture-of-health-prize/spokanecounty-wa-2014.html). One outstanding characteristic of Spokane County is that business is actively at the table for these endeavors. This point was so clearly understood that RWJF chief executive officer Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, a LinkedIn influencer, wrote about Spokane County in her recent post: (Q) How did Spokane Cut Dropout Rate by Half? (A) Business. Prior to working at Priority Spokane, Ms. May served for 11 years as a director of development at Washington State University in a number of units, including corporate and foundation relations. Ms. May is a graduate of the University of Kentucky with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in education.
Michael O’Donnell, Ph.D., M.B.A., M.P.H., is the director of the Health Management Research Center at the University of Michigan. Dr. O’Donnell has developed and managed workplace health promotion programs for more than 50 medium, large, and very large employers over the span of three decades. Dr. O’Donnell’s work includes developing strategic and operational plans, refining and implementing corporate policy, developing incentive systems, writing program materials, creating communication campaigns, hiring and training staff, presenting lectures, auditing and refocusing programs, and creating and implementing evaluation efforts. In addition, Dr. O’Donnell has more than 10 years of experience managing health promotion programs in clinical settings. He has been responsible for developing and managing comprehensive health promotion programs, integrating health promotion protocols into occupational medicine screenings, developing a wellness section of an electronic medical record, developing intensive clinical health promotion programs, training medical staff to refer qualified patients into intensive health promotion programs, creating grand rounds series, integrating health promotion concepts into medical school curriculum, and helping to develop a study to test the health and financial impacts of health promotion programs offered to Medicare recipients. Dr. O’Donnell has presented more than 200 keynote, breakout, and workshop presentations on six continents to groups ranging in size from 6 to 4,000. Audiences have included business leaders, health promotion professionals, scientists, corporate boards, senior-level government officials, local community members, and cruise ship passengers. The most popular topics have been the health and financial impacts of health promotion, integrating active living strategies into everyday life, the strategic design of workplace health promotion programs, and integrating health promotion into national health policy. Dr. O’Donnell earned a Ph.D. in health behavior and health education from the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, an M.B.A. in general management, and an M.P.H. in hospital administration from
the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his undergraduate work in psychobiology at Oberlin College, and he received a high school diploma from the Seoul Foreign School, in Seoul, South Korea.
Nicolaas Pronk, Ph.D., M.A., is vice president for health management and chief science officer at HealthPartners. In his role Dr. Pronk is focused on improving population health with practical programs and solutions that may be applied to the workplace, clinical, and community settings. He supports the development of new models to improve health at the research, practice, and policy levels. Dr. Pronk is a member of the Community Preventive Services Task Force and the Roundtable on Obesity Solutions of the IOM at the National Academy of Sciences. He holds an adjunct faculty position as professor of society, human development, and health at the Harvard School of Public Health and is a visiting professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. He is widely published in both the scientific and practice literature and is a national and international speaker on population health and health promotion. Dr. Pronk received his doctorate degree in exercise physiology at Texas A&M University and completed his postdoctoral studies in behavioral medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Gary Rost is the executive director of Savannah Business Group (SBG) on Healthcare Cost Management, Inc., and its subsidiaries, SBG Preferred Health Resources and Savannah Health Alliance, located in Savannah, Georgia. The Coalition has 19 member employers representing more than 52,000 lives. SBG is active in programs that improve the quality and delivery of health care such as hospital safety, electronic medical records, health information exchange, medical homes, community data collection, and other quality improvement programs. SBG Preferred Health Resources is the contracting arm of the Coalition. SBG’s contracts include a preferred provider organization network (using a direct-to-provider contracting model), a pharmacy benefit manager, an employee assistance program, and other contracts. Savannah Health Alliance is the Coalition’s nonprofit community health improvement program. Mr. Rost is currently serving as a member of the Georgia Child Obesity Project Steering Committee, a member of the Georgia Hospital Association’s Care Transitions Action Group, a member of the National Business Group on Health’s Value-Based Purchasing Committee, a board member of Healthy Savannah, a board member of the Chatham County Safety Net Planning Council, and a member of the Savannah/Chatham County Community Indicators Coalition, and he serves on the St. Joseph’s Candler Health
System institutional review board. Mr. Rost has been with SBG since 1993 and has been executive director since 2001. Prior to joining SBG, Mr. Rost served 20 years in the U.S. Army.
Grace Suh, M.P.P., is the manager of education programs for corporate citizenship and corporate affairs at the IBM Corporation. In her position, Ms. Suh manages IBM’s global portfolio of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and literacy programs. These programs include Teachers TryScience (teacherstryscience.org), TryScience (tryscience.org), MentorPlace, and Reading Companion (readingcompanion.org). Ms. Suh also manages IBM’s 9–14 school model development, beginning at Pathways in Technology Early College High School (ptechnyc.org) in Brooklyn, New York, and now being replicated in 27 schools in the United States. Prior to working at IBM, Ms. Suh worked at the Children’s Defense Fund, a national child advocacy organization in Washington, DC, where she focused primarily on child welfare policy. In addition to the corporate and nonprofit sectors, Ms. Suh has worked on education and children’s issues in state and city governments. Ms. Suh has a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University.
John W. Whittington, M.D., is lead faculty for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Triple Aim initiative focused on achieving the optimal balance of good health, positive patient experience of care, and low per capita cost. Previously he was medical director of knowledge management and patient safety officer at OSF Healthcare System. Prior to that position, Dr. Whittington worked for many years as a family physician. He has been IHI faculty on numerous projects, including safety, spread, inpatient mortality reduction, the Executive Quality Academy, and Engaging Physicians in a Shared Quality Agenda, among others. He is part of the IHI team that works on research and development.
Charles M. Yarborough, M.D., M.P.H., FACOEM, FACPM, is the director for medical strategies in the Health and Wellness Department at Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMC), based in Bethesda, Maryland. He joined LMC in 2007. Dr. Yarborough has more than 25 years of experience in guiding health initiatives for global corporations, including Exxon and Caterpillar, and in evaluating medical services for expatriates and international business travelers. For 3 years before joining LMC, he was a senior managing scientist in New York City for an international engineering and health consulting firm. Training under Dr. Tinsley Harrison (who was editor-in-chief of the first five editions of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine)
he obtained an M.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an M.P.H. from the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Yarborough took his internship and residency training in internal medicine under Dr. Walter Kirkendall at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, including the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, followed by training in occupational and preventive medicine at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. Dr. Yarborough is board-certified in internal medicine and also in preventive and occupational medicine, and he holds active medical licenses in five states. Dr. Yarborough is on the medical staff of Johns Hopkins Suburban Hospital in Bethesda and is a voluntary physician for a community health center. He was a chief physician at the Veterans Administration Health Care System and on medical staff of the University Medical Center at Princeton, New Jersey, and he served previously at several other major U.S. medical centers. Dr. Yarborough is an elected member of Delta Omega, the National Public Health Honors Society, and he served on a health advisory committee for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, reporting to its director. Dr. Yarborough was one of a group of corporate physicians who co-authored a statement of support for the first United Nations High-Level Meeting on Non-Communicable Disease involving heads of state, which was held in September 2011. He is an advisor for an occupational medicine residency training program at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and is an associate in the Department of Health Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Yarborough is a voting member of the Physicians’ Consortium on Quality Improvement® of the American Medical Association. In 2011 he was appointed by the governor to serve on the Operating Model and Insurance Rules Committee for Maryland’s Health Insurance Exchange Board. For the past 2 years Dr. Yarborough has served as the co-chair of the International Corporate Health Leadership Council, a think tank on health issues facing global companies. Dr. Yarborough is serving a third elected term as a member of the board of directors for the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM). He led the development of the initial framework for ACOEM’s Corporate Health Achievement Award (CHAA), serving as the CHAA committee chair for 7 years, and he continues to serve as a judge for this annual award and others. Dr. Yarborough received the ACOEM President’s Award in 1997. As well as having published many articles and serving as a reviewer for prominent peer-reviewed medical journals, Dr. Yarborough has been invited to speak many times at U.S. and international meetings, including the International Congress on Occupational Health held in Stockholm concerning global health care delivery systems and population health management and a TEDx session on healthy life expectancy in 2013.
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