Speakers

Dr. Clancy serves as the Assistant Under Secretary for Health (AUSH) for Discovery, Education & Affiliate Networks (DEAN), Veterans Health Administration (VHA), effective July 22, 2018. The Office of the DEAN fosters collaboration and knowledge transfer with facility-based educators, researchers and clinicians within VA, and between VA and its affiliates.

Prior to her current position, she served as the Acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the second-largest Cabinet department, with a $246 billion budget and over 424,000 employees serving in VA medical centers, clinics, benefits offices, and national cemeteries, overseeing the development and implementation of enterprise-wide policies, programs, activities and special interests. She also served as the VHA Executive in Charge, with the authority to perform the functions and duties of the Under Secretary for Health, directing a health care system with a $68 billion annual budget, overseeing the delivery of care to more than 9 million enrolled Veterans. Previously, she served as the Interim Under Secretary for Health from 2014-2015. Dr. Clancy also served as the VHA AUSH for Organizational Excellence, overseeing VHA’s performance, quality, safety, risk management, systems engineering, auditing, oversight, ethics and accreditation programs, as well as ten years as the Director, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

She is a highly experienced and nationally recognized physician executive. Dr. Clancy is a general internist and health services researcher, a graduate of Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She holds an academic appointment at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and serves as Senior Associate Editor, Health Services Research Journal. She has contributed to eight academic textbooks and authored, co-authored and provided invited commentary in more than 225 scholarly journal articles. She served as member of the National Quality Forum’s Board of Directors, Chair of the AQA Alliance and served on the Board of Governors for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and was presented with the 2014 Quality Champion Award from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. She was also named as an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and was selected as the 2015 Outstanding Federal Executive of the Year by Disabled American Veterans. In 2018, she was selected as one of the Top 50 Physician Executives by Modern Healthcare, and in 2019, she was identified as one of the 50 Most Influential Clinical Executives by Modern Healthcare.

Christopher S. Holliday, PhD, MPH, MA, FACHE is the Director of the Division of Diabetes Translation (DDT) in CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, where he provides leadership and strategic direction to the science and programs conducted in DDT to prevent type 2 diabetes, prevent diabetes complications, reduce health disparities, and improve the health of all people with diabetes.

A senior leader with twenty-five years of executive management experience, Dr. Holliday has worked in population and public health, primary healthcare, and in non-profit settings at the national, state, and local levels. He provides leadership in evidence-based practices to prevent chronic disease and helps shape policies, systems, and environments that support and promote health, equity, and well-being.

Before joining CDC in 2021, Dr. Holliday was with the American Medical Association (AMA), where he served as Director, Population Health and Clinical-Community Linkages, Improving Health Outcomes. He led a multi-disciplinary team in efforts to develop and implement national, clinical and public health strategies for improving health outcomes for high-impact chronic medical conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

Throughout his career, Dr. Holliday has been a passionate advocate for health equity, focused on improving outcomes for populations disproportionately impacted by chronic and mental health conditions, addressing root cause social and structural determinants of health, including access to care.

After beginning his academic career at Northwestern University (BA, Psychology), Dr. Holliday received an MPH in Health Policy and Management at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and trained as an applied research scientist, earning an MA and a PhD in community psychology at Georgia State University. He is board-certified in healthcare management as a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.

Viet Nguyen is an internist, pediatrician, clinical informaticist and consultant to government and commercial organizations in developing interoperable workflows and technologies. He has over 15 years of experience in Health IT focused on interoperability standards and product development. Formerly the CMIO for Lockheed-Martin and Leidos Corporation, Dr. Nguyen is a nationally recognized FHIR educator, a FHIR Foundation Board Member, CMO for Logica Health (formerly Health Services Platform Consortium) and Technical Director for the HL7 Da Vinci Project. The Da Vinci Project is a Payer-Provider-Vendor collaboration addressing value-based-care use cases and developing HL7 FHIR-based, standard solutions.

Deepti Pandita MD is the chief Health Information officer at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis, MN, a safety net academic medical center and also a Level one Adult and Pediatric Trauma center. Dr. Pandita is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and in Clinical Informatics. She is also Program Director of the Clinical Informatics Fellowship at Hennepin Healthcare. She received her Medical Degree from Christian Medical College, Vellore, India and did her residency training at University of North Dakota

Dr. Pandita is a Board member of the  American Medical Informatics Association and Chair of the Medical Informatics Committee for the American college of Physicians leading several National committees and initiatives. She is also on the board for Minnesota doctors for Health Equity and Board member of the Healthcare Executive Forum.

Deepti has a passion for using innovation and technology to improve care delivery for the underserved and marginalized populations. She started a telemedicine program that delivers substance abuse treatment to incarcerated patients at the Hennepin county jail and is working to create health equity in the space of Telemedicine for all underserved populations during the Pandemic and beyond.

Bryn Rhodes is a key contributor and Subject Matter Expert in the Clinical Quality Framework Initiative, primarily involved with the development and support of the Clinical Quality Language Specification. His expertise in Clinical Decision Support stems from implementation experience building a real-time Clinical Decision Support system for an industry leading Electronic Health Records system. With 20 years in software development, he has a broad range of implementation experience, from desktop client/server line-of-business and medical applications to enterprise and web-scale information systems. His career has focused on the expression and implementation of logic systems, from simple printer-command and build automation interpreters, through full-scale database query compilers and 4GL interface engines. This focus brings a unique and important perspective to bear on the problem of accurate and automatable sharing of clinical quality logic as expressed in knowledge artifacts for Clinical Decision Support and Clinical Quality Measurement.

Dr. Schreiber is currently the Director of the Quality Measurement and Value-Based Incentives Group at CMS. Dr. Schreiber is a general internal medicine physician with over 25 years of health care experience. Most recently, she was the Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer of Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) in Detroit, Michigan. Prior roles at HFHS included the Division Head of General Internal Medicine, and the SVP of Clinical Transformation and IT Integration, where she was the clinical lead of the systemwide Epic implementation. The Epic implementation and use earned HFHS a Davies Award in 2018. She has also held senior leadership roles at the Detroit Medical Center, where she was the Chief Quality Officer, and with Trinity Health System where she was the national system Chief Medical Officer, and acting interim Chief Medical Information Officer.

In addition to her health system roles, Dr. Schreiber has served on numerous quality committees including Michigan Hospital Association statewide quality committee, and Board of Directors for the MHA Keystone Center and the Patient Safety Organization, the Board of Directors of MPRO (Michigan Peer Review Organization – the Michigan QIO), the Board of Directors of Health Alliance Plan insurance company, the National Quality Forum Patient Safety Metrics Committee, and the National Quality Partners. She has worked with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) including as part of its Leadership Alliance, the Pursuing Equity initiative, and an initiative to enhance Board of Trustees engagement in quality through a partnership with IHI and National Patient Safety Foundation. Dr. Schreiber has also served as a member of the Epic Safety Forum, and the Cerner Academic Advisory Group.

Dr. Schreiber’s interests are quality improvement, quality measures, and the intersection with electronic medical records to advance quality and quality measures.

Margaret E. O’Kane is founder and president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and has received the Picker Institute Individual Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care, as well as the Gail L. Warden Leadership Excellence Award from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership.

Modern Healthcare magazine has named O’Kane one of the “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” 12 times, and one of the “Top 25 Women in Healthcare” 3 times.

She is a board member of the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Institute for Exceptional Care. She is also a board member and former board chair of Healthwise, a nonprofit organization that helps people make better health decisions.

O’Kane holds a master’s degree in health administration and planning from Johns Hopkins University, where she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award.

As the Chief Executive Officer of HL7, Dr. Jaffe serves as the organization’s global ambassador, fostering relationships with key industry stakeholders. A 37-year veteran of the healthcare IT industry, Dr. Jaffe was previously the Senior Global Strategist for the Digital Health Group at Intel Corporation, Vice President of Life Sciences at SAIC, and the Director of Medical Informatics at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. He completed his medical training at Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health and at Georgetown University. Formerly, he was President of InforMed, an informatics consultancy for research informatics. Over the course of his career, he has been the principal investigator for more than 200 clinical trials, and has served in various leadership roles in the American Medical Informatics Association. He has been a board member on leading organizations for information technology standards, and served as the chair of a national institutional review board. Most recently, he held an appointment in the Department of Engineering at Penn State University. Currently, Dr. Jaffe is the Visiting Scholar at the University of California San Diego Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Jaffe has been the contributing editor for several journals and has published on a range of subjects, including clinical management, informatics deployment, and healthcare policy.

Eric Schneider, MD, M.Sc. leads NCQA’s measurement, research and contracting agenda as Executive Vice President of the Quality Measurement and Research Group. In this role, he helps drive NCQA’s efforts to create a more equitable health care system and to advance the move to digital quality measurement.

Dr. Schneider came to NCQA from The Commonwealth Fund, where he was Senior Vice President for Policy and Research and a member of its executive management team. He has a long history with NCQA, most recently as Co-Chair of its Committee on Performance Measurement. He served on that committee for more than 10 years, including nine as Co-Chair.

Prior to his tenure at The Commonwealth Fund, Dr. Schneider was principal researcher at the RAND Corporation and held the RAND Distinguished Chair in Health Care Quality. As the first director of Rand’s Boston office, Schneider built its highly regarded multidisciplinary team of health services researchers.  As a professor at the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School Eric taught health policy and practiced primary care internal medicine for 25 years.

Widely regarded as one of the nation’s preeminent health services researchers, Dr. Schneider has authored more than 125 published peer-reviewed research investigations and dozens of other scientific or medical research publications, reviews, chapters, editorials, and more. His work has focused on four aspects of health care quality — performance measurement methods; evaluation of quality and safety measurement in public reporting and financial incentive programs; use of health care quality measures to assess racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health care quality; and evaluation of innovative approaches in health insurance, organization and financing of health care, and the organization of health care delivery.

Dr. Schneider trained in health services research, public health and primary care general internal medicine. He holds a Bachelor of Science, cum laude, in biology from Columbia University and a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He is a member of the AcademyHealth Board of Directors and a fellow of both the American College of Physicians and the National Academy of Social Insurance.