Thought Leaders
Porcha Carter - In the role of Director of Community Partnerships, Porcha leads the community models in UnitedHealth Group’s Community Strategy portfolio. She is responsible for establishing, growing, and maintaining relationships with both internal enterprise stakeholders and external community partners including but not limited to faith-based organizations, public and private sector representatives, and healthcare providers and systems. Porcha leverages these partnerships to convene multi-sector groups to identify community needs and collaboratively design and implement strategies to help solve identified challenges to improve health outcomes. Prior to joining UnitedHealth Group, Porcha’s public health career centered around project management, strategic visioning and planning, partnership engagement, and health equity. While at the local health department level, Porcha served as the Chronic Disease Prevention Program Manager, Senior Manager, and Interim Division Director of the Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention Division. In these roles she had oversight of the implementation of numerous data-driven and community-centered interventions that served participants across the lifespan.
Julie Donohue, PhD - Dr. Donohue is Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. She holds secondary appointments in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and is a Senior Advisor to the Medicaid Research Center, and Faculty Affiliate in the Health Policy Institute and the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing (CP3). She is an Associate Editor at JAMA Health Forum. Dr. Donohue conducts research on insurance coverage, financing, and delivery of healthcare with a focus on use of prescription drugs and behavioral health services. Much of her current research focuses on improving the quality of substance use disorder treatment for Medicaid enrollees. In collaboration with AcademyHealth, in 2017, she launched the Medicaid Outcomes Distributed Research Network (MODRN), which includes 14 state university-partnerships. MODRN, for which Dr. Donohue leads the Data Coordinating Center, conducts research to improve the quality and equity of care delivered to Medicaid enrollees and informs state and federal policy.
Crystal Eubanks, MS - Crystal Eubanks is the Vice President of Care Transformation, and oversees PBGH’s Care Transformation portfolio of programs, initiatives, and technical assistance. In this role, she also leads the California Quality Collaborative (CQC), a multi-stakeholder healthcare improvement program advancing quality statewide through payer alignment and direct delivery system support. Crystal has implemented collective impact networks, developed technical bodies of work for behavioral health integration and practice facilitation, authored toolkits and learning resources, and served as an improvement advisor and trainer in technical assistance programs. She brings quality improvement, clinic operations and leadership experience from on-the-ground work with ambulatory and primary care delivery systems in the private and public sectors. Previously as Director of Quality and Data Analytics at LifeLong Medical Care, Crystal led care transformation and improvement initiatives to achieve multi-site recognition as a National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) Level 3 Patient-Centered Medical Home and national recognition as a top performing health center.
Anne Gaglioti, MD, MS, FAAFP - Dr. Anne Gaglioti is a practicing family physician. She serves as an Associate Professor at The Center for Health Equity, Education, and Engagement in Research and the Population Health Equity Research Institute at The MetroHealth System and the Center for Community Health Integration at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a Senior Strategic Advisor and Associate Professor at the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. She completed her medical school and residency training in Family Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where she served as chief resident, and completed fellowship training in Primary Care Health Policy and Research at Georgetown University and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. She received her Master of Science in Clinical Research at Morehouse School of Medicine. Her academic career as a teacher and researcher has been focused on advancing equity, patient, and community-engaged research infrastructure, and measuring the impact of the primary care system on health and health equity. As co-director of the Southeast Regional Clinicians Network (SERCN), a practice-based research network made up of Federally Qualified Health Centers across eight southeastern states, she conducts practice-based research in the primary care safety net grounded in a robust patient and stakeholder engagement infrastructure. She is also a health services researcher. Her work with healthcare claims and other large datasets focuses on the intersection of primary care, place, and health equity among populations disproportionately impacted by health inequities.
Patrick Gordon, MPA - Patrick Gordon is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Rocky Mountain Health Plans (RMHP) in Colorado, a UnitedHealthcare Company. UnitedHealthcare serves 6.4 million Medicaid members in 31 states and Washington, D.C. Patrick has led reform efforts in the Colorado market for practice transformation, payment reform and technology adoption to help make the healthcare system work better for everyone. Prior to becoming CEO, Patrick served as RMHP’s Vice President where he developed a statutory program known as Payment Reform for Medicaid Enrollees (PRIME), which significantly enhances payments for primary care, integrated behavioral health and quality improvement, while producing a net savings for Colorado taxpayers.
Kevin Grumbach, MD - Dr. Grumbach is Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He is a Founding Director of the UCSF Center for Excellence in Primary Care and Director of the Community Engagement Program for the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. His research and scholarship on the primary care workforce, innovations in primary care, racial and ethnic diversity in the health professions, and community health improvement have widely influenced policy and practice. He was an adviser to Congress and the Obama Administration in developing the Primary Care Extension Program section of the Affordable Care Act. Dr. Grumbach cares for patients at the family medicine practices at San Francisco General Hospital and UCSF Health.
Howard Haft, MD, MMM, CPE, FACPE - Dr. Haft is the former Executive Director of the Maryland Primary Care Program at the Maryland Department of Health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he served as the Medical Planner for the Unified Command and lead on the Vulnerable Populations Task Force. He also served as Deputy Secretary for Public Health Services in the Maryland Department of Health and as the interim Executive Director of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange. Dr. Haft was the Founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Conmed Healthcare Management, a publicly traded company. He currently serves as Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and as Chairman of the American Heart Association's Ambulatory Quality Committee. Dr. Haft’s career has been dedicated to solving complex medical-care delivery challenges and implementing programs to serve diverse populations in Maryland and across the nation.
Andrew Hamilton RN, BSN, MS - Andrew is a Masters prepared Nurse Informaticist with 25+ years of experience in both in-patient nursing care and outpatient community health as well as nursing administration. As the Chief Informatics Officer, Andrew leads AllianceChicago’s strategy related to developing health IT support for promoting interoperability, Patient Centered Medical Homes, and Population Health Management. Andrew also leads the organization's team supporting the development of data reporting & analytics including AI. Andrew is the co-chair of the Chicago Area PCORnet Informatics Working Group and HHS UDS Modernization efforts. He is an adjunct faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Nursing. Prior to working for the Alliance, Andrew was a Pediatric Critical Care nurse at a large academic hospital and a member of their biomedical informatics team. He has also served as the Director of Patient Care Services for Howard Brown Health Center, a CHC located in Chicago. Andrew holds a BS in Nursing and MS in Nursing Business and Health Systems Administration with a focus on Nursing Informatics from the University of Michigan School Of Nursing. Andrew is a Fellow of the third class of the Health Innovators Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Sinsi Hernandez-Cancio, JD - Sinsi Hernández-Cancio, JD, is the Vice President for Health Justice at the National Partnership for Women & Families. She is a national health and healthcare equity policy and advocacy thought leader with 30 years of experience advancing equal opportunity for women and families of color, and almost 25 years advocating for better healthcare access and improved quality of care for underserved communities. Prior to joining the National Partnership’s staff, she was the Founding Director of Families USA’s Center on Health Equity Action for System Transformation, where she led efforts to advance health equity and reduce disparities in health outcomes and healthcare access and quality.
Lauren S. Hughes, MD, MPH - Dr. Hughes is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the State Policy Director of the Eugene S. Farley, Jr. Health Policy Center. In these roles, she leads initiatives to generate and/or translate data for policymakers to inform the design and implementation of evidence-based policy. Her research interests focus on improving rural healthcare delivery, strengthening primary care infrastructure, and enhancing behavioral health integration.
Yalda Jabbarpour, MD - Dr. Jabbarpour is a Family Physician and Director of the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies. In this role, she oversees a team of researchers who create and curate the evidence to support primary care. She conducts research on the primary care workforce, payment for primary care, scope of practice for family physicians, factors contributing to primary care burnout and the integration of public health and primary care. Dr. Jabbarpour has authored the Primary Care Collaboratives evidence report on primary care for the last four years.
Art Kaufman, MD - Dr. Kaufman is a distinguished Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico. He served in the U.S. Indian Health Service in South Dakota and New Mexico, before joining the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico in 1974. Dr. Kaufman helped initiate the Primary Care Curriculum in New Mexico, which became an international model for change by innovative track in traditional medical schools. He integrated community health workers into the healthcare system and developed a statewide network of University-linked, county-based Health Extension Hubs. He is the Director of New Mexico’s WHO Collaborating Center. In 2015, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine/Institute of Medicine.
Abel Kho, MD, MS, FACMI - Dr. Kho is a Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and Founding Director of the Center for Health Information Partnerships (CHIP) and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IAIM). He has served as PI for several regional or national projects including the ONC funded Chicago Health IT Regional Extension Center, the PCORI funded Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network, and the AHRQ funded Healthy Hearts in the Heartland consortium within the EvidenceNOW: Advancing Heart Health initiative. His research focuses on developing regional Electronic Health Record (EHR) enabled data sharing platforms for a range of health applications including high throughput phenotyping, cohort discovery, estimating population level disease burden, and quality improvement.
Ann Lefebvre, DSW, CPHQ* - Ann Lefebvre is the Executive Director of South Carolina AHEC and the Associate Dean for Community Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. In this role, Ann supports programming for all health professions students and graduate medical education as well as provider training, recruitment, and retention with a focus in rural and underserved areas. Prior to joining SC AHEC, Ann developed and implemented a large practice coaching program that provided the tools and resources for more than 1,200 primary care practices in North Carolina to redesign their practices to improve delivery of care, patient health outcomes, use of technology and staff satisfaction. She has more than 30 years of experience in the healthcare industry and has worked to improve the access and quality of care delivered in a variety healthcare settings. She received her Doctor of Social Work degree from the University of Southern California and her Master of Social Work degree from East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. She is a certified professional of healthcare quality and a black belt in Lean Six Sigma.
*Ann Lefebvre was invited but unable to attend.
Rishi Manchanda, MD, MPH - Dr. Rishi Manchanda is CEO at HealthBegins, a national mission-driven firm that helps Medicaid-serving managed care plans, healthcare systems, and social sector clients to exceed healthcare equity and social needs performance requirements and achieve long-term impact for communities harmed by societal practices. Dr. Manchanda's areas of expertise include building value-based care models for historically marginalized populations, advancing equity through clinical-community partnerships, and designing national policy initiatives to improve population health.
Ned Mossman, MPH - Ned Mossman has spent over 25 years at the intersection of healthcare, research, and IT. In 2014 he joined OCHIN, a nationwide nonprofit health innovation network serving Community Health Centers and Critical Access Hospitals. In his current role as Director of Social and Community Health he oversees OCHIN’s nationally recognized initiatives around increasing collective understanding of social needs assessment, cross-sector collaboration, health equity, and value-based care. He has led OCHIN’s development, submission, and stewardship of national quality measures related to acting on identified patient social needs, and its engagement with member organizations to document and report these activities through the electronic health record. He also plays an active role in a number of national stakeholder groups focused on bridging healthcare and social services, including the HL7 Gravity Project, where he most recently Co-Chaired the Strategic Advisory Committee. Since 2018, he has served on the Board of Directors of 211info, a nonprofit that helps people identify and navigate social service programs in their communities to address needs such as housing, hunger, childcare, and transportation.
Bob Phillips, MD, MSPH - Dr. Phillips is a Clinical Professor at Georgetown and Virginia Commonwealth Universities and is Founding Executive Director of the Center for Professionalism and Value in Health Care in Washington, DC. Dr. Phillips is a Family Physician and practicing Primary Care Physician with training in health services and primary care research. His research currently focuses on the relationship between primary care functions and teams with outcomes. He also runs PRIME Registry, a national primary care registry with related research on social determinants of health, rural health, and changes in primary care practice.
Julia Skapik, MD, MPH, FAMIA* - Dr. Skapik is the Chief Medical Information Officer for the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) and was previously a Senior Medical Informatics Officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. She has a breadth of expertise in health IT interoperability, governance, and clinical content, and CDS standards working in the public and private sector. At NACHC, Dr. Skapik supports health IT stakeholder coordination and engagement, data definitions and measurement harmonization, the NACHC data warehouse and its governance framework and health IT-enabled quality improvement, care coordination, and patient and care team engagement. Dr. Skapik is also the Chair Elect of HL7 International and a member of the HL7 Europe Board of Directors.
*Julia Skapik was invited but unable to attend.
Mark Wallace, MD, MPH - Dr. Wallace is the Chief Clinical Officer for Sunrise Community Health, a federally qualified health center with twelve locations serving northern Colorado since 1973; a Founding Partner and the CEO/CMO of the North Colorado Health Alliance, a non-profit community-based public-private collaboration founded in 2000 whose partnerships treat health as a single complex phenomenon; and the Chief Clinical Officer for Northeast Health Partners, the Medicaid accountable entity for HCPF Region 2. He has also served as a Commissioner and Vice-chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform.
Judy Zerzan-Thul, MD, MPH - Dr. Zerzan-Thul is the Chief Medical Officer for the Washington Health Care Authority (HCA) which administers the state’s Medicaid program and the state’s Employee, School, and Retiree Benefits. Dr. Zerzan-Thul is a general Internal Medicine Physician and began her career as an Academic Researcher at the University of Colorado. Prior to joining HCA in August 2018, Dr. Zerzan-Thul was Chief Medical Officer for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. She has held leadership positions in the Medicaid Medical Director’s Network and served on a number of national committees. She is currently an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Washington.
EvidenceNOW Building State Capacity Grantee Attendees
James E. Bailey, MD, MPH; Tennessee state grantee Co-PI for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity - Dr. Bailey is the Tennessee state grantee PI for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity. He serves as the Robert S. Pearce Endowed Chair in Internal Medicine, Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine, Director for the Center for Health Systems Improvement, and Executive Director for the Tennessee Population Health Consortium at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. In addition to being PI for the AHRQ-funded Tennessee Heart Health Network which seeks to support and strengthen primary care practices across Tennessee in their efforts to improve cardiovascular health, he serves as PI for the aligned CDC-funded Innovative Cardiovascular Disease Program which seeks to promote and disseminate evidence-based approaches to address social determinants underlying adverse cardiovascular outcomes and disparities in collaboration with community health centers serving Tennessee census tracts with highest prevalence of hypertension. He also serves as PI for the Neighborhood Health Hub Program funded by grants and contracts from United Healthcare, Shelby County Government, and the Kemmons Wilson Family Foundation. Dr. Bailey continues to practice general internal medicine as a primary care physician for adults with complex chronic illness and teaches doctors-in-training. Dr. Bailey’s ongoing research focuses on patient-centered approaches to improve healthcare delivery, quality of care, and health outcomes for people in medically underserved areas with multiple chronic conditions.
Shari Bolen, MD, MPH; Ohio State Grantee Co-PI for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity - Dr. Bolen is a Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the Founding Director for the MetroHealth Population Health Research Institute, Director of the CWRU Center for Health Care Research and Policy, and a practicing general internist. Her research is focused on cardiovascular risk reduction. She uses mixed methods, implementation science, and systematic reviews to better understand and improve cardiovascular health among primarily disadvantaged populations. As the Director of Cardiovascular Disease Programs for a non-profit regional health improvement collaborative called Better Health Partnership, she also leads quality improvement initiatives improving blood pressure management in the region and across the state. With CWRU, she co-leads a Medicaid-funded statewide cardiovascular health collaborative (Cardi-OH) focused on expanding primary care team capacity to manage cardiovascular disease in Medicaid patients. Recently, she was funded to co-lead a statewide diabetes collaborative and quality improvement project by Ohio Department of Medicaid.
Anya Day, MPH; Michigan State Grantee Co-PI for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity - Anya Day is a Vice President and Principal Investigator at Altarum, a non-profit organization focused on improving the health of individuals with fewer financial resources and populations disenfranchised by the healthcare system. At Altarum, she plays a dual role leading the organization's proposal and opportunity management team while continuing to lead quality improvement research and implementation projects. Since 2008, Anya has directed programs that help providers and health systems improve quality through technology, continuing education, and better coordination among care teams. She served as an MPI on two recent AHRQ EvidenceNOW projects: Healthy Hearts for Michigan (HH4M), an AHRQ EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity program, and the Michigan Sustained Patient-centered Alcohol-Related Care (MI-SPARC) Trial. Anya previously served as the director and board chair for a seven-state collaborative to implement CMS’s Quality Payment Program across the Midwest and held various leadership roles in Michigan’s ONC designated Regional Extension Center for Health Information Technology. Anya’s research interests and areas of expertise are focused on clinical quality improvement, practice facilitation and health information technology. She has led many dissemination and implementation projects to improve the meaningful use of electronic health records and health data, promote quality improvement and health equity and drive healthcare transformation.
Larry Hearld, PhD; Alabama State Grantee Lead Evaluator for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity - Larry R. Hearld is Professor and Direct of Research in the Department of Health Services Administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is an Associate Director in the UAB Center for AIDS Research and UAB Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research and Education, where he serves as the Director of the Dissemination, Implementation, and Improvement Sciences Core. He is currently the co-editor of Health Care Management Review and serves on the editorial board of Medical Care Research and Review and Health Services Research. His research focuses on the antecedents and consequences of organizational change in healthcare, with special emphasis on dissemination and implementation science in healthcare. He has been a PI and co-I on NIH-, AHRQ-, PCORI-, and foundation-funded studies that examine the dissemination and implementation of quality improvement processes and innovative care delivery models within hospitals, primary care organizations, and local communities. This research utilizes a range of methodological approaches, including effectiveness-implementation hybrid designs, mixed methods, and quasi-experimental designs. He teaches courses in research methods, organizational behavior, and dissemination and implementation science.
Theresa Walunas, PhD; Michigan State Grantee Co-PI for EvidenceNOW: Building State Capacity - Dr. Walunas is the Associate Director for the Center for Health Information Partnerships, Chair of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Track in the Health Sciences Integrated PhD program and Director of the MS in Health and Biomedical Informatics at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. She has led studies funded by AHRQ to implement and assess quality improvement interventions in pragmatic clinical settings and by NIAMS, NICHD and Gilead Sciences to develop strategies to identify complex immune disease and cancer in electronic health record data to support population health management. Her research is focused on identifying, characterizing, and developing models of complex inflammatory diseases using real-world clinical data intersected with mechanistic, social and environmental data that can be translated into clinically actionable strategies for improving quality of care and patient outcomes.
