Board of Directors

Rushika Fernandopulle, MD, MPP Co-Founder, Renaissance Health Rushika Fernandopulle, M.D., M.P.P. is the founder of Renaissance Health, a leader in the design and implementation of high performing, innovative health care delivery systems. He works with a select group of progressive physician groups, hospitals, employers, and public agencies to create new ways to deliver care to dramatically improve quality and service and reduce overall expenditures. He was the first executive director of the Harvard Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement, an effort to leverage top faculty from across Harvard University and senior leaders in health care organizations to tackle the largest, most difficult problems facing the health system. As part of this role he was involved in research on many aspects of the U.S. health care system including racial disparities in care, clinical information systems, pay for performance, and the uninsured. Prior to these positions, Dr. Fernandopulle was managing director and chief medical officer of the Consumer Health Initiative and managing director of the Clinical Initiatives Center, both divisions of the Advisory Board Company, a membership-based research and consulting firm located in Washington D.C. Dr. Fernandopulle is the coauthor or editor of several publications including Health Care Policy, a textbook for physicians and medical students; Uninsured in America: Life and Death in the Land of Opportunity, a book describing what it means to be uninsured in America; and several articles on improving the quality of care in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Dr. Fernandopulle earned his AB, MD, and MPP (Masters in Public Policy) from Harvard University, completed his clinical training at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts General Hospital, is board certified in internal medicine, and serves as an attending physician on the medical service at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Alan Greene, MD, FAAP Chief Medical Officer, A.D.A.M. Dr. Greene is the Chief Medical Officer of A.D.A.M., a leading publisher of interactive health information, and is the founder of DrGreene.com, a leading pediatric web resource. He is an Attending Pediatrician at Packard Children's Hospital, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Senior Fellow at the UCSF Center for the Health Professions. Dr. Greene has been recognized by Advance for Health Information Executives as one of the top 25 most influential forces in health care IT and was named the Children's Health Hero of the Internet by Intel. Dr. Greene has served as both President and Board Chair of Hi-Ethics (Health Internet Ethics), the non-profit organization formed to address privacy, advertising and content quality issues for Internet health consumers. He has also served as an advisor to URAC for both their inaugural and their updated health web site accreditation program. He is a founding member of the e-Patient Scholars Working Group, and a founding partner of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. Dr. Greene is the author of Raising Baby Green (Wiley Books, 2007), From First Kicks to First Steps (McGraw-Hill, 2004), and The Parent's Complete Guide to Ear Infections (Avon Books, 1997). He is also the co-author of The A.D.A.M. Illustrated Family Health Guide (A.D.A.M., Inc., 2004). He is the medical expert for three additional books, The Parent's Soup A-to-Z Guide to Your New Baby, (Contemporary Books, 1998) The Parent's Soup A-to-Z Guide to Your Toddler, (Contemporary Books, 1999), The Mother of All Baby Books, (Hungry Minds, Inc., 2002). He also appears frequently as a medical expert on television, radio, and in numerous print and online publications.

Jessie Gruman, PhD President and Founding Executive Director, Center for the Advancement of Health Jessie Gruman is the founder and president of the Center for the Advancement of Health, an independent, nonpartisan Washington-MacArthur Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation and others. Since it was established in 1992 the Center has worked to translate health research into effective policy and practice. The Center focuses specifically on ensuring that evidence of the influence of social, behavioral and economic factors on health is used in efforts to prevent, manage and treat disease. Dr. Gruman has worked on this same set of concerns in the private sector (AT&T), the public sector (National Institutes of Health) and the voluntary health sector (American Cancer Society). She received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia University. She is a Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Health at The George Washington University and serves on the boards of trustees of the National Health Council, the Public Health Institute, the Sallan Foundation, and the Center for Information Therapy, among others. Dr. Gruman is a Fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and has received the Society's awards for distinguished service and "Leadership in Translation of Research to Practice." She was recognized for outstanding service from the American Psychological Association and was honored by Research!America for her leadership in advocacy for health research. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University and the Presidential Medal of The George Washington University. She served as the Executive in Residence at Vassar College and serves on the editorial board of The Annals of Family Medicine, and is a member of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Gruman is the author of numerous articles and essays published in the scholarly and public media. Her book for the general public, After Shock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You - or Someone You Love - a Devastating Diagnosis (Walker Publishing, 2007) is about how people use scientific information to make decisions about their healthcare. For further biographical information, see Who's Who in America (60th Edition).

James Hereford Executive Vice-President, Strategic Service and Quality, Group Health Cooperative, Seattle James Hereford is the executive vice president of strategic services and quality for Group Health Cooperative. He is responsible for health informatics, information technology, human resources, and quality. Prior to taking this position, Hereford was the executive director of health informatics directing the use of information technologies to improve patient care and the patients' care experience, including clinical information systems and Internet technologies. Hereford directed the development of the nationally recognized MyGroupHealth member health portal at the www.ghc.org Web site. He was also executive director of customer services, responsible for strategy development for customer service, assessment of service quality, and customer service operations. His first position at Group Health was as a senior quality consultant and quality education manager. Before coming to Group Health Cooperative in 1991, Hereford worked at the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group as a teacher and project facilitator of total quality management companies in the Puget Sound region. Hereford began his professional career as a mathematics teacher and basketball coach in 1982 in Lewistown, Montana. He also served on the faculty of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement in Boston, Massachusetts, where he taught courses on improvement methods in health care and the use of quantitative approaches to improvement. Hereford has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in mathematics from Montana State University and has concluded his course work for his PhD at the University of Washington. He is currently a faculty member of the University of Washington's School of Public Health, and teaches courses in statistics and operations research in the masters of health administration program.

Warren Jones, MD, FAAFP Executive Director, Mississippi Institute for the Improvement of Geographical Minority Health, University of Mississippi Medical Center Warren A. Jones, M.D., a family physician and retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, is the founding Executive Director of the Mississippi Institute for the Improvement of Geographical Minority Health Disparities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is also a Professor of Family Medicine and a Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Senior Health Policy Advisor. Jones is also an assistant clinical professor of Family Medicine at Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. He was most recently Executive Director of the Division of Medicaid in the Office of the Governor of Mississippi, the state's health program for over 768,000 indigent Mississippians. He serves on the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He also serves on the Advisory Council to the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Jones is Past President of the American Academy of Family Physicians, a 94,300-member primary care specialty society. He is also Chair of the Maternal Child Council, Past Chair of the Family Medicine Section and Aerospace & Military Medicine Section of the National Medical Association. He also served on the Minority Affairs Governing Council for the American Medical Association. Jones retired from the United States Navy and his position as the medical director of the over 10 million member TRICARE Military Health Program, the military's health insurance program in 2001. He previously served as director of medical and clinical services for the Pacific region of TRICARE coordinating care for U.S. service members and their families from Alaska to Madagascar. Jones has served on the President's Select Panel on Surviving and Living after Cancer, Chiropractic Implementation Committee for the U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs and on the Secretary's Chiropractic Advisory Committee. In addition, Jones was a member of the Expert Panel for the Medicaid Disease Management Initiative for the Center for Health Care Strategies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Kaiser Permanente Foundation. He is a member of the Key Stakeholders Advisory Board to the Evidence Based Research Center for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Diabetes Foundation and has previously served on the Board of the National Health Council and the National Advisory Council to Rewarding Results, an advisory panel to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California Health Foundation which led to the development of the Pay for Performance initiative in health care. He is also a member of the expert panel for the Innovations in Prevention Awards, sponsored by Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson. He is a previous Associate Vice Chancellor for Multicultural Affairs at the University of Mississippi and past Director of the Mississippi Area Health Education Centers (AHEC). Jones received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Dillard University in New Orleans. He received his medical degree from Louisiana State University School of Medicine in 1978, and completed a family medicine residency at the Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Fla. Jones also earned a fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Jones is a Fellow of the AAFP, an earned degree awarded to family physicians for distinguished service and continuing medical education. Jones has received numerous military honors including the Defense Superior Service Medal and the Navy Commendation Medal for superior performance. He received the Meritorious Service Medal three times. He was recently honored as the Outstanding Black Educator in Mississippi by the Board of the Institutions of Higher Learning and has been awarded a National Role Model Award by Minority Access, Inc.

Donald W. Kemper, MPH Founder and CEO, Healthwise Founding Chair, Hi-Ethics, Inc. As chairman and CEO of Healthwise and founding chairman of the Information Therapy Commission, Kemper is a passionate advocate for improving patient-physician partnerships through prescription information. By offering every patient the right information as part of the process of care, the health care system can achieve measurable improvements in medical outcomes, patient safety, the overall cost-effectiveness of care, and patient satisfaction. Kemper coauthored Information Therapy: Prescribed Information as a Reimbursable Medical Service with Molly Mettler. The Ix® book lays out both the concept and the practical details of how information prescriptions will become a core and expected part of health care. Articles on Kemper and information therapy have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, and Health Forum Journal, as well as other health industry and consumer publications. Kemper has helped to define and promote what people can do to improve their own health problems and their health. He coauthored five medical self-care and health promotion handbooks and created the vision for the Healthwise® Knowledgebase, an online health information and decision-support tool that supports Ix programs. Kemper was recognized by Advance for Health Information Executives as one of the top 25 most influential forces in health care IT.

Albert Mulley, Jr., MD, MPP Chief, General Medicine Division, Massachusetts General Hospital Albert G. Mulley, Jr. is Chief of the General Medicine Division and Director of the Medical Practices Evaluation Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine and Associate Professor of Health Policy at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Dartmouth College and was awarded doctor of medicine and masters in public policy degrees from Harvard before training in internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has since done pioneering work in the application of clinical epidemiology and decision theory to the evaluation and improvement of medical intensive care, primary care including prevention and screening, and other health care services. Dr. Mulley's research has focused on the use of decision theory and outcomes research to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted variations in clinical practice. This work has led to development of research instruments and approaches, including shared decision-making programs, to support clinicians and patients in their decision-making roles, and to catalyze clinical trials. These approaches have been shown to decrease utilization of high cost medical and surgical interventions while improving measures of decision quality, including stronger associations between patients' personal trade-offs regarding health outcomes and the care that they receive. Dr. Mulley's work aimed at improving the quality of health care decision making has influenced the agendas of many public and private organizations engaged in clinical care as well as medical research and education. He was a founding director of the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making and a director of the Health Commons Institute. Dr. Mulley currently serves as an Overseer of Dartmouth Medical School, a Director of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical School, and a Trustee of Dartmouth College. He has also served on multiple committees of the Institute of Medicine, of professional societies and as a consultant and visiting professor to government agencies, health care organizations, and academic medical centers in North America, Europe and Asia.

Annette M. O'Connor, RN, BScN, MScN, PhD Canada Research Chair in Health Care Consumer Decision Support; Professor, University of Ottawa; Senior Scientist, Ottawa Health Research Institute Dr. O'Connor is a Professor at the University of Ottawa (School of Nursing and Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine) and a Senior Scientist at the Ottawa Health Research Institute Clinical Epidemiology Program. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Health Care Consumer Decision Support. The goal of Dr. O'Connor's research is to improve: a) the decision making of people facing tough health care choices; and b) the support provided by health professionals who counsel them. Her contributions include: a conceptual framework for managing decisional conflict; over 30 patient decision aids; a widely used evaluation measure of decisional conflict; the first systematic review of trials of patient decision aids, and several knowledge translation interventions for implementing patient decision support. Internationally, Dr. O'Connor has projects in the U.S, U.K, and Chile. She leads the International Cochrane Collaboration team that summarizes trials of patient decision aids (over 50) and maintains a global inventory of evaluated patient decisions aids (over 500). Dr. O'Connor co-leads a 14 country international consensus process on standards for developing and evaluating patient decision aids (IPDAS). She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2005) and has been recognized with awards such as the Society for Medical Decision Making's John M. Eisenberg Award for Exemplary Leadership in the Practical Application of Medical Decision Making Research (2004), the University of Ottawa's Excellence in Research Award (2005), and Ottawa Life Sciences Council's Health Innovation Award (2006).

Helen Riehle Executive Director, Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care Helen Riehle has been the Executive Director of Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care (VPQHC) since September, 2000. Prior to coming to VPQHC, she served 18 years in the Vermont Legislature, the last eight as a Chittenden County State Senator. Helen chaired the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, the Health Access Oversight Committee and Administrative Rules Committee. In addition she has served on numerous health- related commissions and committees. During her tenure in the legislature she developed bills dealing with comprehensive welfare restructuring, Medicaid expansion for children and low income Vermonters, tobacco tax policy, clean in-door air and funding for VPQHC to name a few. The mission of VPQHC is to develop and implement a system of quality design and measurement for physicians, and other health care professionals, hospitals, and other health care facilities, users and purchasers that produces continuous improvement of health care and efficient uses of resources. VPQHC has worked with many physicians and health care organizations in advancing Ed Wagner's Chronic Care Model. VPQHC also is engaged in regional health information exchange projects.

Paul Wallace, MD Medical Director, Health and Productivity Management Programs, Kaiser Permanente; Senior Advisor, Care Management Institute and KP-Healthy Solutions, Kaiser Permanente Paul Wallace, MD, is an active participant, program leader and perpetual student in clinical quality improvement, especially in the areas of performance measurement, evidence based medicine and disease management. As Medical Director for Health and Productivity Management Programs in Kaiser Permanente's national Permanente Federation, he now leads work to extend KP's experience with population-based care to further develop and integrate wellness, health maintenance, and productivity enhancement interventions. He was previously the Executive Director of Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute (CMI) from 2000 - 2005 and continues as a Senior Advisor to CMI and to KP Healthy Solutions, the KP disease management company established in 2005. Dr. Wallace, an Internist and Hematologist, joined Kaiser Permanente in 1989, and has participated on Kaiser Permanente's program wide New Technology, Research, Guidelines and Diversity Committees. He is a member of the National Advisory Council for the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Institute of Medicine Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice, the Medical Coverage Advisory Committee for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Committee on Performance Measurement for NCQA. He is the Board Chair for the Center for Information Therapy, and is also a Board member for the Disease Management Association of America (DMAA). In 2004 he was recognized by DMAA with the Karen Coughlin Individual Disease Management Leadership Award. He and his wife Jonalyn have 4 children, ages 13 to 28, and a thoroughly spoiled Golden Retriever.

Andrew Webber President and CEO, National Business Coalition on Health Andrew Webber joined the National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH) as President and CEO in June of 2003. NBCH is a national, not-for-profit, membership organization of 80 local and regional business coalitions on health, dedicated to health system reform through value-based purchasing, community by community. As President and CEO, Mr. Webber is responsible for directing all association activities including value based purchasing programs, government relations, education and training, communications, and technical assistance. Mr. Webber currently sits on the Board of Directors of the National Quality Forum, the Leapfrog Group, the Bridges to Excellence organization, and the Center for Information Therapy.

Gale Wilson Steele Chief Strategic Officer and Founder, MedSeek Gale Wilson-Steele, founded MedSeek, Inc. in 1996 with the mission of advancing communications on healthcare through Internet technology. Today MEDSEEK specializes in online healthcare solutions that empower patients, physicians, employees and consumers to securely exchange knowledge, interact with healthcare organizations and access medical records online. MEDSEEK is recognized as a leading portal solutions provider, and has enabled over 600 hospitals to effectively connect their stakeholders through portals, websites and Intranets. Gale currently is launching a new consumer-focused web strategy that will enable patients to confidently find competent medical care through a physician rating and review site and social network called CareSeek. A graduate of Stanford University, Gale is married and has five children.

Janet S. Wright, MD, FACC Senior Vice President, Science and Quality, American College of Cardiology Janet S. Wright MD, FACC joined the staff of the American College of Cardiology as Senior Vice President for Science and Quality in May of 2008. She practiced invasive cardiology for 23 years as a partner in Northstate Cardiology Consultants, Chico, California. She received her medical doctorate at the University of Tennessee and completed her residency and cardiovascular fellowship in San Francisco. Dr. Wright served on the Board of Trustees of the ACC and most recently chaired the College's Presidential Task Force on Performance Assessment, Recognition, Reinforcement, Reward, and Reporting (PAR4). She is a member of NCQA's Physician Program Committee and of the National Committee on Evidence-based Benefit Design of the National Business Group on Health. Dr. Wright serves on the board of the Center for Information Therapy, an independent non-profit organization committed to the provision of personalized health information during each healthcare encounter. Since its inception in December of 2003, Dr. Wright has been a member of the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee, the 29 person board charged with administering the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, as outlined by the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative.