Neil d’Autremont
Senior Adviser
Neil d’Autremont brings wide experience in care-continuum issues as well as in marketing in the healthcare sector, including pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, medical software and insurance.
He has in recent years particularly focused on the use of network applications and electronic health records to assure patient confidentiality while increasing the clinical quality and cost-effectiveness of healthcare networks in sharing information to benefit the patient’s long-term health. Thus he adds to CMG’s well-established expertise in care-continuum improvements. He has studied the impact of EPIC implementation on large medical schools and hospital systems and medical practices as well as the effects of Meaningful Use guidelines for Medicare on physician practices.
Mr. d’Autremont is also president for sales and marketing for MNR Analytics.
His experience has included positions as Division Sales Manager in Virology, as a rheumatology specialist for Roche Labs, where among other activities, he was a community liaison in market development — experience of particular value in population-health matters. He has also worked in sales for Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals and Syntex Labs, run Nd’A Marketing with medical software, and was a lead benefits analyst for Standard Insurance Co., where he managed high-liability disability cases.
He has presented data to the California Senate and made presentations in the corporate suites of major corporations and to key opinion leaders in multiple medical specialties.
Neil d’Autremont has a B.S. in psychology from Oregon State University and a graduate certificate in medical informatics from Oregon Health Science University.
Mark O. Loveless, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Dr. Loveless has focused on translational medical research and healthcare-delivery systems’ clinical quality, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. He is now working on improving integrated healthcare teams’ extended resource networks and accelerating the diffusion of innovation in healthcare institutions.
Thus his work dovetails with CMG’s focus on improving coordination among the various parts of the care continuum, most notably now through helping to develop bundled-payment systems.
Dr. Loveless, an internist and infectious-disease specialist, is chief executive and scientific director of MNR Analytics, a research and applied-science consulting firm of healthcare professionals seeking to better understand healthcare-team structure, function and effectiveness.
Previous positions have included his service as medical director for the Influenza and Transplant Medicine groups at Genentech Inc.
He is a clinical associate professor in the Oregon Health Sciences University School of Public Health.
In 2014 his achievements were recognized with a Fellowship in the American College of Physicians.
Mark Loveless received his M.D. from the Honors Medical Program at Northwestern University Medical School and a master’s degree in health administration from the Department of Public Health at the University of Washington.
Rebecca Block, Ph.D.
Senior Adviser
Dr. Block brings to CMG deep knowledge of the patient experience through the care continuum and how to improve it. Dr. Block develops innovative methodologies to study the patient perspective in the context of the broader health network and then applies that knowledge to make the treatment process work better for patients and providers.
This speaks to CMG’s experience in strengthening the links between all providers in a patient’s episode of care to improve outcomes and control costs. Bundled-payment systems, made imperative by new private- and public-sector insurance mandates, probably comprise the best current example of the application of care-continuum expertise. CMG has been working intensively in helping hospital systems to develop bundled-payment systems.
Dr. Block is also Director of Network Science for MNR Analytics, a healthcare research and consulting firm.
Dr. Block recently left her post as Director of Research and Advocacy with Critical Mass: Young Adult Cancer Alliance. As a social scientist with a clinical social work background, she has studied psychosocial outcomes, healthcare delivery and mental health in a population-health context.
The synergy of life experience, clinical and research skills and connection to social and professional communities is at the heart of Dr. Block’s work.
Rebecca Block has a doctorate in social work and social research from Portland (Ore.) State University; a master’s degree in social work from Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C., and a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Towson (Md.) State University.
Robert B. Harrington
Senior Adviser and Co-Founder
Mr. Harrington, a co-founder of Cambridge Management Group, has a particular strength in engaging physicians to be accountable to each other and their broader healthcare community. This has become increasingly important with the epochal healthcare-system changes of recent years.
He has had a prominent role in most CMG projects, including those involving clinical priority-setting, physician-institution relationships, strategic planning and group practice/physician organization development. He has been a featured speaker at VHA, the Healthcare Roundtable, Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Cerner Annual Conference.
Before founding CMG, Mr. Harrington was a director of APM Inc., a national healthcare management consulting firm, a co-founder and executive vice president of Care One Group Inc. — a developer and manager of primary-care medical offices in the Boston area — and an administrator at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, in New York City.
Mr. Harrington is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Harvard Business School.
James L. Dorsey
Co-Founder
James L. Dorsey, a co-founder of Cambridge Management Group, brings extensive operating and financial experience to the firm. He has been involved in most CMG projects and has had a major role in those involving operations, finance and graduate medical education.
His career includes senior operating positions in a national clinical- laboratory company and a primary-care management company, senior financial positions in a hospital management company, and acquisitions and development in medical services. He has also served as chief financial officer at University Hospital in Boston, planner for the Boston University Medical Center and budget director for Boston University. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Business School.
Amelia J. (Lia) Spiliotes
Senior Adviser
Lia Spiliotes is a partner and senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group (CMG) with more than 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry. Her career has focused on the managed-care and community-health-center sectors, as well as health-information technology, the pharmaceutical industry and investment banking.
Ms. Spiliotes is a leading expert on developing service and care-delivery programs that help clients improve their clinical-quality and -outcome measures while controlling costs. Noteworthy is her ability to reframe business challenges and build collaboration skills among organizations’ leaderships and staff. This helps to change work practices and align resources to optimize patient care, streamline operations and strengthen organizations’ finances.
Lia Spiliotes has helped managed-care organizations, such as Humana Inc., to create risk-management programs for their Medicare populations. She has worked within the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) sector, recently serving as the interim chief executive officer of Community Health Connections Inc., a large Massachusetts FQHC. There she led a team to successfully restructure operations, enhance clinical-service delivery and improve financial performance.
She regularly works with FQHC executives and their boards of directors to stabilize, turn around and develop health-center strategies and operations.
Before CMG, Ms. Spiliotes served in a strategic advisory role in the biopharmaceuticals arena at Leerink Swann & Co. She worked with early and mid-stage emerging technology companies to secure financing for business development and revenue growth through venture-capital and strategic partnership investment.
In addition, her experience within the healthcare-policy and regulatory environments includes assisting organizations to position themselves for healthcare reform and developing population-management strategies for managing risk. She founded and was senior partner in a diabetes-management company, ValeoVox, a provider of online solutions for chronic-care management.
With such professional-services firms as Computer Sciences Corp., Arthur D. Little Inc., and The Alexander Group, Ms. Spiliotes has worked with clients to maximize growth and profitability of existing and new businesses.
Ms Spiliotes received a Robert Woods Johnson Foundation grant to develop interactive health-management tools for the Hispanic community. She earned a B.A., with a concentration in neuroscience, from Smith College and a M.Sc. in management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
Dorothy (Dolly) Bellhouse
Senior Adviser
Ms. Bellhouse is a highly experienced healthcare executive and consultant with particular experience and strength in planning for and managing change. She is skilled at nurturing the creativity needed to address expected and unexpected problems and opportunities in the churn of today’s healthcare environment. And she further strengthens one of Cambridge Management Group’s core missions: To help hospital and health systems align the administrative and clinically related activities of all their employees to improve their organizations’ overall condition.
Using her emotional intelligence, the values of servant leadership and her years as an executive of large hospitals and health systems, she is highly accomplished in building teams that help their institutions achieve major operational and clinical improvements.
Her range of experience includes strategic planning, new-business development, marketing, public relations, quality-performance improvement, physician relations and managed-care contracting.
Ms. Bellhouse is dealing with these matters in her current work with the Healthcare Council of Western Pennsylvania.
Her positions have included:
- Vice president for integrated-delivery-system planning for Jefferson Hospital-Allegheny Health Network, in Pennsylvania.
- Director/owner of Rule 4 Consulting (clients included Mayo Clinic Health System and Alina Health, in Minnesota; UnityPoint Health, in Iowa; Centura Health, in Colorado, and St. Vincent Health, in Indiana).
- Senior vice president of Bridgeport Hospital (part of the Yale-New Haven Health System).
- Vice president for corporate strategy of Heritage Valley Health System, in Pennsylvania.
Before her healthcare-management career, Ms. Bellhouse worked for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and taught in the School of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Vermont. She has been widely published in national business publications.
Dolly Bellhouse has a MBA in health administration and finance from the University of Chicago.
Elizabeth Bergey, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Elizabeth Bergey, M.D., is a pediatric radiologist practicing in central Pennsylvania. She is the president and chief executive of Quantum Imaging & Therapeutic Associates.
Among her strengths, Dr. Bergey brings to Cambridge Management Group her rich experience in developing, and improving the efficiencies of, physician groups and in nurturing highly collegial and productive physician-hospital relations. Using an unusual background encompassing administrative and clinical skills, she has negotiated many professional-service agreements and has structured and negotiated hospital-physician joint ventures.
She has served on the board of the Holy Spirit Health System for the past six years, in part because of the ability she has displayed in negotiating agreements and while chairing the system’s Department of Radiology.
Her career has included negotiating and implementing teleradiology contracts, developing and negotiating management contracts for outpatient services within Holy Spirit Health System and providing ongoing management to multiple outpatient centers. Her financial and administrative achievements have included increasing imaging-center profitability by 300 percent.
A lifelong athlete, Dr. Bergey was one of the first girls in the United States to play Little League baseball. The mother of three children, she is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and earned her medical degree at Temple University.
Donald S. Bialek, M.D., MPH
Senior Adviser
Dr. Bialek brings to Cambridge Management Group vast experience in care integration and healthcare informatics – two crucial elements of the current healthcare revolution. He helps physicians and hospitals redesign care, especially by modifying clinical workflow, to better manage value-based contracts for comprehensive care in Accountable Care Organizations and specific episodes in bundled-payment models.
His career shows a remarkable mix of streamlining and improving patient care in community settings and knowledge of new physician-practice models, including physician engagement with new information systems.
Dr. Bialek has served in a wide range of senior administrative, clinical leadership and consulting posts. He has worked with community hospitals, academic medical centers, physician groups, health-insurance plans and life-science companies in institutional governance, operational and strategic matters.
His positions have included:
- Chairman, president and CEO of Alliance Medical Practices (primary-care-physician management)
- Chairman, president and CEO, Paradigm Medical Teams Inc. (hospital-based physician clinical contract management)
- Chairman, Aprus Inc. (physician-practice management and accounts-receivable management)
- Faculty, Harvard University
- Director, Training & Education Group, International Health Systems Program, Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health
- Chairman, Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, Quincy (Mass.) Hospital
- Chairman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management seminar on “Aligning Information Technology and Business Strategy’’
- Chief medical officer, Galloway Consulting
- Managing director, Huron Consulting Group
- Senior industry expert, Global Health Solutions, CSC Corp
- Senior executive physician consultant, Dearborn Advisors
Donald Bialek received a BSc. degree from the University of Maryland, a medical degree from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in public health from Harvard. He did residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital and Children’s Hospital in Boston and a fellowship at Children’s Hopsital in Boston. Dr. Bialek also completed advanced-management studies at Harvard Business School and a fellowship in medical informatics in the Harvard/MIT program.
Carolyn P. Britton
Senior Adviser
Ms. Britton, president of Medical Practice Solutions (MPS) and a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group, specializes in patient-care operations and product-line development. She assists clients with work-flow redesign and information-systems implementation to improve operational and financial performance.
Clients value Ms. Britton’s collaborative work style, which encourages staff to take part in work-flow change with less disruption. During work-flow-redesign projects, staff is encouraged to enthusiastically participate by, among things, adding their knowledge of the organization to the project. In so doing, of course, they increase the probability that the projects will achieve their goals.
Changes to information systems usually cause stress for organizations, both operationally and financially. Ms. Britton’s experience, emotional intelligence and operating approach helps clients succeed in completing these changes with minimum stress and maximum operational and financial success.
In addition to her work at MPS, Ms. Britton has been vice president of practice management at Caritas Christi Physician Network, in Massachusetts, and director of operations and finance at Joseph Smith Community Health Center, in Waltham, Mass. In both positions she led major work-flow and information-systems redesign. These redesigns led to significant improvements to the bottom lines of both organizations.
Ms. Britton holds an MBA with a healthcare-management concentration from the Boston University School of Management. She is a member of the Medical Group Management Association and a Certified Medical Practice Executive (CMPE) of the American College of Medical Practice Executives.
David L. Brown, M.D.
Senior Adviser
David L. Brown, M.D., an anesthesiologist and a leading expert on pain management, has joined Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) as a senior adviser. He survived his own prolonged life-threatening illness related to military-acquired hepatitis C, which gave him a particularly deep understanding of the needs of patients and their families facing end-of-life decisions. The experience led Dr. Brown, an Air Force veteran, to found Curadux — a firm dedicated to pioneering a revolutionary decision-support model for those facing advanced illness.
Dr. Brown’s research has focused on acute pain relief in post-surgical patients, as well as relief of pain related to pancreatic cancer. He and colleagues are investigating a novel cannabinoid-2 compound (MDA-7) that shows promise for Alzheimer’s disease symptom management and relief of neuropathic pain.
He recently retired academically and clinically from the Cleveland Clinic, where he was professor and chairman of the Anesthesiology Institute.
Previously, he led the departments of anesthesiology at the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, and the Virginia Mason Medical Center, as well as serving as professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Brown is past president of the American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine; past editor-in-chief of the journal Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine; past president of the Association of University Anesthesiologists, and past chairman of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME) Residency Review Committee for Anesthesiology. He was also a member of the ACGME board.
He has been a director of the American Board of Anesthesiology and chairman of the Foundation for Anesthesia Education and Research.
Dr. Brown received his medical degree in 1978 as a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the medical honor society, at the University of Minnesota, after undergraduate work at Iowa State University and the University of South Dakota. In 1982 he completed his anesthesiology residency at Wilford Hall U.S. Air Force Medical Center, in San Antonio. Before that, he was a flight surgeon in the USAF for the 319th Bombardment Wing.
Patrice Kenney Clifford
Senior Adviser
Ms. Clifford, a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group (CMG), helps clients with critical transitions and initiatives. Drawing on her management experience across diverse healthcare services, she guides client staff through complex project management, business development and strategic implementation in uncertain times.
In recent consulting assignments Ms. Clifford led a multi-disciplinary team developing a risk-adjusted, primary-care payment formula for patient-centered medical homes; directed implementation of a precedent-setting joint venture between a world-renowned cancer institute and the largest health system in New England, resulting in fully integrated oncology services; managed the relocation and opening of several physician group practices; researched and developed detailed business plans for two new service lines in an academic medical center, and directed organizational preparedness for National Council on Quality Assurance accreditation for a not-for-profit health plan focused on low- and moderate-income people.
Before becoming a consultant, Ms. Clifford was the administrator (chief operating officer) at Joslin Clinic, executive director of the physician-hospital organization at a satellite hospital of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston; director of operations for Image America (a national diagnostic radiology company), and director of new-product development at Hillhaven Corp. She also held several executive positions within American Medical International (AMI), including hospital senior management. This work helped lead to a joint venture between AMI and McLean Hospital in contract-managed psychiatric services. She also directed corporate development for an AMI subsidiary.
Ms. Clifford is a graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Management.
Timothy Crowley, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Dr. Crowley is a physician leader and a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group (CMG).
He is an expert in physician-network development and management. Healthcare organizations typically call upon Dr. Crowley to turn around and optimize the financial performance of struggling employed physician groups generating unsustainable losses. In addition, his extensive experience in both the fee-for-service and capitated-risk-reimbursement systems is valuable to organizations trying to manage the “pivot” from fee for service to capitated risk reimbursement in their nascent Accountable Care Organization development efforts.
Finally, his experience creating and developing the Cardiovascular Institute at the Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, in Boston, helps systems contemplating similar models with their high-margin specialists.
In 2006, after practicing internal medicine and helping hospitals build their physician networks for almost 30 years, Dr. Crowley co-founded the Cardiovascular Institute, which unified the physicians, nurses and administrators of the cardiac- and vascular-surgery and other cardiology service lines under one operating structure.
As chief of network development, he negotiated arrangements with more than 40 new cardiologists and several primary-care-physician groups, which resulted in a 50 percent increase in open-heart surgeries and cardiology procedures performed at CVI and produced over $50 million in new top-line revenue.
As senior vice president at Caritas Christi HealthCare, Dr. Crowley was directly responsible for more than 400 employed physicians and a total of 1,200 practitioners in the system. In a single year, his leadership and innovative methods significantly contributed to turning around the system from a $50 million loss to a $30 million operating gain. He also restructured the contracting network’s physician provider agreements (PPA) and helped negotiate a fully capitated contract for 25 percent of the system’s patients.
During the first 15 months, he used the full panoply of compliant physician-alignment arrangements to recruit more than 135 physicians to the six community hospitals in the system, including several large primary-care and specialty groups with full panels and more than 40 primary-care physicians (PCPs) right out of training.
Tim is married, has five children and lives in Sudbury, MA.
Dr. Crowley received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.D from Tufts University Medical School.
Linda A. Cyr
Senior Adviser
Linda Cyr draws on a diverse background to address healthcare-sector business problems at the intersection of strategy, leadership and entrepreneurship. She brings distinctive expertise in fostering collaboration among networks of leaders to develop and advance complex inter- and intra-organizational agendas.
Linda’s career spans corporate and academic settings. As an independent consultant, she has served senior leaders at such global corporations as Novartis, AB InBev and EY, as well as at startup firms. She teaches physicians in the Masters in Healthcare Management program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and has served as director of Corporate Health Leadership Programs within executive education at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Previously, Linda was a partner at Tapestry Networks, where she created and managed multi-stakeholder networks and working groups of C-suite pharmaceutical executives, government regulators and health-sector payers as well as clinical experts and patient advocates in eight European nations. Before joining Tapestry Networks, Linda was an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School and at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Early in her career, at GTE, Linda managed direct marketing teams, and designed and administered sales compensation plans and a company-wide sales management curriculum. Linda earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a B.S. from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia.
Robert A. DeNoble
Senior Adviser
Robert A. DeNoble has long experience as a healthcare executive, management consultant and national thought leader, especially in behavioral health. This backbground makes Mr. DeNoble a very valuable resource for everyone coping with the sector’s ongoing disruptive changes.
Key aspects of his work have included:
- Strategic planning and assessment. He has initiated and led strategic-planning programs for hospitals and medical groups.
- Organizational assessment. Mr. DeNoble has reorganized institutions to improve coordination and operational efficiency, leading to greater patient satisfaction and reduced costs. These efforts included revising position descriptions and work flows and incorporating new technologies, such as electronic medical records, automated reminder calls, etc.
- Financial assessment and planning. He has developed financial plans and projection models to assess organizations’ financial viability. These have been used to evaluate the costs of implementing strategic plans and determining the revenue required for successful implementation.
Mr. DeNoble has been president and chief executive of the Marino Center for Integrative Health, in Cambridge, Mass.; president and chief executive of Applied Management Systems, in Burlington, Mass.; senior manager/director in the healthcare-consulting practice at KPMG, and senior executive at Rhode Island Hospital, in Providence, Mount Auburn Hospital, in Cambridge, Mass., and McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass.
Especially note that as McLean’s associate general director of operations and planning, he helped change the hospital’s focus from inpatient service to a continuum-of-care delivery model — change that’s now happening at hospitals across America.
Mr. DeNoble is on the board of the Austen Riggs Center, the internationally famed psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Mass. As Finance Committee chairman for many years, he helped guide the institution to financial health. He also served on the Strategic Planning Committee, and chaired the Medical Director/CEO Search Committee.
As a sub-contractor for a national consulting firm, he led a team redesigning the behavioral-health programs at Jackson Memorial Hospital, in Miami. That institution has an extensive behavioral-health program serving a predominantly Medicaid population. He has also been a behavioral-health expert for a leading consulting firm for a Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment program and Vital Access Provider projects in New York State.
Robert DeNoble was one of the founding directors of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association, its president from 2005 to 2008, and chair or co-chair of its annual conference from 2000 to 2004. He has also taught healthcare financial management at the Boston University School of Public Health.
He holds a bachelor of science degree in finance and accounting from St. Peter’s College, in New Jersey, and a master of business administration from the Harvard Business School.
David E. Ford
Senior Adviser
David E. Ford is principal of the Health Commons Group, based in Woodland, Wash., and former CareOregon chief executive.
He has a national reputation as a manager and innovator from almost 40 years of senior leadership positions in healthcare marketing, provider relations and health-plan operations, including start-ups and turnarounds. CMG is particularly excited that Mr. Ford is joining us because of his work in helping to develop and manage new health-system models. Note, for example, his role in Primary Care Renewal, an initiative to move primary care to a coordinated, team-based system.
CMG has been spending increasing time with physicians, hospital administrators and others to facilitate the move to new practice models, demanded by government and the marketplace.
Mr. Ford was chief executive of CareOregon, a not-for-profit, 165,000-patient Medicare and Medicaid Health Plan in 2003-2013. In that role, he directed a financial turn-around from a negative-$17 million net worth and four days of cash on hand to reserves of $180 million. CareOregon’s in-sourced claims-processing system was converted to a QNXT system in nine months and a concurrent Medicare Special Needs Plan and a Medicare Advantage start up were implemented.
Meanwhile, CareOregon was awarded an $83 million Consumer Cooperative start-up grant by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to serve the exchange, employer, individual and self-funded markets. It also funded a Federally Qualified Health Clinic, with four Neighborhood Health Centers, mostly to serve adult Medicaid and uninsured members in communities with adult-access problems.
Mr. Ford’s organization established ‘‘Care Support and System’s Innovation’’ grants to improve care delivery by teaching new skills to providers and community partners. Results included a Primary Care Renewal program that grew from a five-clinic pilot to eventually transform 85 practices, serving 55 percent of CareOregon members, and save 19 percent in costs compared to non-program practices. CareOregon adapted this program for 17 hospitals, including two in British Columbia and the Detroit Veterans Administration operation.
CareOregon created five community-based Coordinated Care Organizations, similar to Accountable Care Organizations, but with structural community/consumer representation, to create local healthcare mediating structures to integrate care locally.
In 2002-2003, David Ford was principal consultant for Health Commons, in Highland, Md., where his clients included Premera Blue Cross, MedStar, National Health Center and Helix Health Plan. Previous work included serving as chief executive for the Mid-Atlantic Region of AmeriGroup, a for-profit Medicaid-only health plan; CEO of ETHIX Northwest, a PPO network; CEO of Aetna Northwest Region; vice president for healthcare systems of Blue Cross of Washington and Alaska, and vice president of healthcare systems for Washington Physicians Service, in Seattle.
David Ford has a B.A. in American studies from the University of California at Davis. He was an Army infantry first lieutenant in Vietnam during the war there.
Thomas Hansen
Senior Adviser
Thomas Hansen, a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group, has extensive experience in managing all aspects of health-services delivery. He is skilled at getting the best thinking of physicians and other point-of-care staff to collaborate to grow service volume, especially in an Accountable Care Organization environment. He helps physicians, nurses, clinical and administrative staffs to work together to improve quality, control resource use and measure performance.
Mr. Hansen has 39 years of senior executive healthcare experience at academic medical centers, acute-care hospitals, a Fortune 500 company, a senior-living-center development company and in private consulting. He was a leader in the early development of two significant ACO-type businesses, and has significant successful experience in healthcare-business development, strategic planning, medical-staff development and physician relationships, physician joint ventures and alignment strategies, and profit-and-loss responsibility for many operating companies.
Mr. Hansen has worked for American Hospital Supply Corp; Provena Health in Illinois; Lehigh Valley Health Network and the Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania; HealthCare Colorado; CentMass Systems Corp. in Massachusetts, and Life Care Centers of America in Tennessee; as well as several consulting companies. Mr. Hansen has been chief executive or other senior officer in these enterprises for 35 years.
He has received a national award for strategic planning and been elected to the board and served as president of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD). He has made numerous presentations and written articles about healthcare issues throughout his career. He is keenly interested in developing positive working relationships among physicians, hospitals and payers.
Mary Heffernan, R.N.
Senior Adviser
Mary Heffernan, a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group, is the founding partner of Tannery Lane Partners, a healthcare consultancy specializing in business strategy, new business development, developing innovative care-delivery models and assisting with such regulatory matters as certificate of need and conversion proceedings. With more than 25 years of public- and private-sector experience, she is very highly regarded in the Connecticut healthcare community.
She began her career as a practicing registered nurse and then became a nursing executive, before taking on wider executive positions in healthcare. Ms. Heffernan has become very skilled at driving clinical and business change through developing actionable content to address institutions’ urgent immediate needs and crafting long-term structural change. She is intimately familiar with the public-and-private sector sides of healthcare, and the relationships between them.
Before forming Tannery Lane Partners, Ms. Heffernan was the Connecticut commissioner for healthcare access and state director for health-system development. She also served Bridgeport Hospital as director of planning and government relations and as director of operations management. Before then, she was simultaneously director of quality management at Bridgeport Hospital and the former Park City Hospital.
Mary Heffernan has a bachelor of science in nursing degree from Georgetown University and a master of science in nursing degree from Pace University.
Ruth M. Kelley, R.N.
Senior Adviser
Ms. Kelley has decades of leadership in behavioral health. Her management experience and clinical knowledge from serving Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) clients are of increasing value as the importance and number of FQHC’s swells and as the role of behavioral health becomes better understood by patients, clinicians, payers and policymakers. She has extensive knowledge of community health centers’ role in integrating primary care and behavioral health.
Ms. Kelley, a seasoned executive and a registered nurse, has wide experience with a panoply of behavioral-health issues, particularly in serving populations suffering from substance use and co-occurring disorders. Her work at The Dimock Center, which runs a large Boston FQHC, where she was chief of behavioral health, received national attention.
In 2014, she received The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Behavioral Healthcare, the largest Massachusetts advocacy organization for mental-health and substance-abuse issues.
She has worked in substance-abuse matters for more than 30 years, during which time she has gained extensive experience in general administration, contract negotiations, grant procurement, program and policy development for women, men and their families. She has sat on multiple professional committees at the local, state and national level.
Before her career at Dimock, Ms. Kelley served as nurse, counselor and coordinator for patients with substance-use disorders at the Massachusetts Osteopathic Hospital and at New England Memorial Hospital. Before then, she worked at Sancta Maria Hospital, in Cambridge, Mass., where, among other achievements, she designed and implemented a substance-abuse awareness program.
Ruth Kelley has a master’s degree in management from The Heller School of Social Policy at Brandeis University and a bachelor of science degree in nursing from Northeastern University.
Bill Koenig
Senior Adviser
Based in Seattle, he has had a long and distinguished career as an expert in adult learning, leadership and organizational development, marketing, strategic planning, as an entrepreneur and as a civic leader, including in the healthcare sector. His work in the last includes his former board presidency of Country Doctor Community Clinic, an example of the community-health organizations that CMG has been working with in this new era of community health and accountable care.
He is currently the executive director of Organization Systems Renewal Northwest (OSR), where for the last 13 years he was program director and a member of the core faculty for a graduate program based on leadership, systems thinking and systems dynamics. OSR has a partnership with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, which focuses on sustainable business. Bill is also the past board chair of the Whidbey Institute and participates in the development of their leadership programs.
Bill Koenig has held leadership positions in the technology, financial-services and manufacturing sectors.
He has been president and chief executive of Cantametrix Inc., a start-up company using digital-signal processing and psycho-acoustic modeling; was founder and president of DiscoverMusic.com, a business-to-business infrastructure company; co-founded and was president of KidStar Interactive Media, a programming and marketing company that targeted families with pre-teen children with a package of interactive media; founded, and was the executive director of, the Video Access Center, a precursor of YouTube, and ran international marketing for Mosaix Inc., a manufacturer of outbound calling systems.
He has also worked at Russell Investments, Automatic Data Processing and Irwin Management Co., where he had high-level consulting assignments with the Ford Foundation, Yale University, the Urban Institute, the National Council of Churches and the Delta Foundation.
Mr. Koenig has a Ph.D. in mythological studies from Pacific Graduate Institute based on a dissertation on leadership and the unconscious, a master’s degree in whole systems design and organizational development from Antioch University and completed his first year of MBA studies at Seattle University. He received his B.A. degree in honors English Literature from Dartmouth College, where he was quarterback of the football team and worked under a National Science Foundation grant developing award-winning computer programs to teach anthropology.
Stephen R. Laverty
Senior Adviser
Mr. Laverty has long been a healthcare leader — as a senior hospital executive, independent executive consultant, innovator and investor. He brings his knowledge of new and established administrative and reimbursement systems and technologies to providers to help them meet operational, financial, regulatory and demographic challenges.
For example, he has a thorough knowledge of payment bundling for joint replacements and other new processes incentivized by CMS and other payers to move providers away from fee for service toward fee for value to control costs and improve outcomes. And he brings to providers an intimate knowledge of challenges and opportunities as the transition to population health accelerates.
Mr. Laverty is currently an investor in Nalari Health, a Providence, R.I.- based early-stage healthcare company specializing in remote care delivery targeting populations with complex, chronic and costly illness. He is currently also engaged with Boxboro, Mass.-based Senscio Systems, whose products and services apply artificial intelligence in the form of a predictive indicator for the care of patients with chronic and complex health issues.
Previously, his experience has included, in chronological order, service as interim president and chief executive of Waterbury (Conn.) Hospital; president and chief executive officer of (Beverly, Mass.-based) Northeast Health System, which owned and operated acute-care, behavioral-health and long-term-care programs; president and chief operating officer of Children’s Hospital, Boston; president and chief executive of Winchester (Mass.) Hospital; vice president for finance of Milton (Mass.) Hospital, and director of budget and program for Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston.
Stephen Laverty has an MBA from Suffolk University and a BA in business administration from St. Michael’s College.
Reza Mahdavi
Senior Adviser
Reza Mahdavi is a seasoned successful executive, technologist and consultant with an extraordinary mix of business and applied-technology experience and results. Client leaders and project teams benefit from his emotional intelligence and resilient energy. He is both an award-winning manager and a highly effective teacher.
He brings these strengths to help Cambridge Management Group clients increase customer use of clients’ health services, software and related services. He helps to make process analytics and patient-specific data swiftly available and understandable to clients. CMG is integrating Mr. Mahdavi’s experience with existing CMG services to guide client teams launching bundled episodes of health services and further focus on improving clinicians’ effective use of software.
Mr. Mahdavi is celebrated for his ability to help clients use integrated platforms and other technology with ease and with maximum effectiveness. In doing so, he assists healthcare organizations as they learn to develop a seamless experience for patients and providers.
He notes: “Healthcare will be impacted in ways that we can’t possibly imagine today. The culture change involved in getting us from here to there is my interest. I have spent my life understanding cultures of organizations and what moves people to do what they do. I focus on guiding customers to best use the technologies that will help them prosper.’’
Reza Mahdavi has been an executive at five high-technology companies – Cisco Systems Inc.; GroupVisual.io; Actility Inc.; Anevia Group Inc., and Ipanema Technologies Inc. In all his posts he has shown very strong management, sales and planning capabilities even as he has kept up to the minute in new technology.
He is probably best known for his work at Cisco Systems, where, among other duties, he led the company’s sales and service operations in developing nations. In this post, he helped make the region the company’s highest growth region in the world. And so for three years running he was named Cisco’s vice president of the year.
As Cisco’s vice president for corporate affairs and general manager of its Global Learning Network he created a team from engineering, product management, product marketing, service and consulting who created a program to make Cisco synonymous with education. Mr. Mahdavi’s teaching/consulting skills made this particularly appropriate.
Reza Mahdavi, who is based in Cambridge, Mass., and Paris, has a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Bridgewater State University, in Massachusetts, and an executive MBA from the Stanford Business School.
W. Edward Massey
Senior Adviser
Edward, a full-time writer and consultant, assists CMG clients in complex and entrepreneurial organizational-development assignments that involve physicians, institutions and physician-institution relationships. Decades of consulting, finance and executive experience in healthcare, including high-tech medical devices, major teaching hospitals and national home-healthcare networks, enable him to provide guidance in all areas of planning, finance and operations to meet increasingly complex organizational and system requirements. He helps to develop new market initiatives and delivery vehicles responsive to today’s rapidly changing reimbursement and quality-control/delivery environment.
The author of two award-winning novels (Every Soul Is Free and Telluride Promise), Edward writes on themes that focus on communicating and transferring values, particularly across generations. He brings these narrative skills — and his current work developing and implementing formats and events to communicate these values — to CMG clients at organizational turning points, including crises and growth. Edward helps healthcare executives, including physician executives, to understand how they got to their present situations, how to empower staff with their values, and how best to move their organizations forward.
Among other achievements in a 32-year career as a healthcare entrepreneur, investor and executive, Edward founded a physician-based brachytherapy company and a home-healthcare company that grew to 17 states and 3,300 patients; it provided para-professional, skilled-nursing, respiratory-therapy and infusion-therapy services. He also led development financing for the company creating an artificial heart as well as for two drug-delivery companies. He was a partner of E.M. Warburg Pincus & Co., a leading venture-capital firm, and a co-founder of A.P.M., where he was instrumental in converting the firm from an ambulatory-care-delivery company to a consulting company.
Edward lives in Stamford, Conn., with his wife, Anne, and has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a B.A. from Yale.
Annie Merkle
Senior Adviser
Ms. Merkle, a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group, has been an adviser and leader for many client projects involving organizational development, change management, leadership development and employee engagement. Her work has helped to facilitate mergers, restructure organizations, develop new business strategies and deploy new technology. She has extensive experience working with senior leaders in pharmaceuticals, financial services, higher education and nonprofits.
Ms. Merkle is president of The AMI Solution, Inc., a consulting firm that she founded in 2001 that delivers organization effectiveness and change-management solutions.
With finely honed skills in designing and facilitating interactive sessions. she leads groups to accomplish their business goals while improving members’ communication skills.
In 2005-2012, Ms. Merkle trained and coached hundreds of executives in North and South America, Europe and Asia in international leadership-development programs.
In 2006-2010, she was president of the board of the Organization Development Network of New York (ODNNY), a professional-development and networking organization. She led the transformation of ODNNY and its board, creating a new vision, strategy and culture.
Before founding AMI, Ms. Merkle was vice president for corporate development at TechSpace, where she created an infrastructure to help incubate start-up tech companies. Previously, she was a senior consultant with Ernst & Young’s business-transformation consulting practice and an account manager with Powercom-2000. She began her career with FedEx in its information-technology division.
She has been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, the University of New Haven and the State University of New York.
Ms. Merkle has an M.A. degree in organization psychology from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Michigan, where she majored in French. She is certified as a Newfield Network coach, certified for Hogan Assessments (HPI, HDS and MVPI), qualified for Myers Briggs Type Indicator assessments and certified for Color Q Personality Profiles.
She lives with her family in Guilford, Conn.
Jonathan Merril, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Jonathan Merril, M.D., a Cambridge Management Group senior adviser, has devoted his career to improving provider and patient education through technology. He is currently developing a ‘’chronic care university’’ at Partners HealthCare. The new ‘’university’’ is an online service for patients and primary-care providers meant to improve the lives of people with chronic conditions, with the first program to be focused on multiple sclerosis.
Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) has increasingly worked with providers to improve care and control costs associated with patients with chronic conditions as their numbers increase with the aging of the population. Dr. Merril and his colleagues at Cambridge Management Group recognize the growing need to manage chronic diseases with innovation in diagnostics and therapeutics.
He uses mobile and simulation technology and healthcare-education expertise to work with businesses, government and non-profit organizations to create novel opportunities to enhance care.
He is also the chief executive of Astute Technology, which streams large medical conferences, including those of the American Heart Association, the American Society for Clinical Oncology and many other organizations. Dr. Merril holds many patents in the digital capture of such gatherings.
Dr. Merril has used the Internet and App technology to build some of the most widely used online (including mobile) learning resources for physicians and patients. These systems power the Partners Healthcare Office of Continuing Professional Development and some key activities (including board reviews) of various other large non-profit healthcare organizations.
He is an expert in building and integrating platforms for continuing education, maintenance of licensure and promoting best practices for hospitals and professional societies.
Dr. Merril received his M.D. degree from The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He did his internship in internal medicine and then completed a fellowship in medical informatics in a joint program of George Washington and Massachusetts General Hospital. Jonathan Merril is married and has three children.
Karen L. Miller, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Karen L. Miller, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist, brings many years of experience in serving a wide range of patient populations as well as extensive research and teaching. She brings to Cambridge Management Group particularly strong expertise and experience with low-income and other disadvantaged populations.
She is currently providing outpatient gynecologic services at the Maliheh Free Clinic, in Salt Lake City, while conducting genetics research to develop a noninvasive test for endometriosis. Meanwhile, she continues to teach obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah Medical School, with which she has been associated for many years as a professor whose work has included, besides teaching, mentoring and research, helping to develop certain national guidelines for gynecological care.
Dr. Miller has a broader clinical background than most ob-gyns. This has included a year of training in general surgery, and serving as urgent-care physician for the Industrial Medical Center, National City, Calif., where she treated victims of industrial accidents, and as general medical officer for the Indian Health Service at the Unitah and Ouray Reservation, in Roosevelt and Ft. Duchesne, Utah. Other activity for underserved populations has included doing ob-gyn work in American Samoa.
She received her medical degree from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A., in German and a B.S. in general science from Oklahoma City University.
Steven M. Mirin, M.D.
Senior Adviser
Dr. Mirin is a psychiatrist with 35 years of experience in planning and implementing change in complex healthcare organizations.
He was president and psychiatrist in chief of McLean Hospital (1988-97) and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (1992-99). From 1997 through 2002 he was director of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and subsequently a director in the Healthcare Practice at Navigant Consulting.
As a consultant he has worked with the administrative and clinical leadership of academic health centers, healthcare systems and hospitals on strategic planning, governance issues, leadership development, mergers and acquisitions, performance improvement and physician-hospital relationships.
Dr. Mirin uses systems thinking to help integrate hospitals’ clinical and academic mission with their business performance and to help develop regionally integrated networks of primary and specialty-focused inpatient and ambulatory care. His consulting projects have included developing new organizational and governance structures for inpatient and ambulatory-services, creating strategic plans for clinical-service delivery and working with multi- hospital systems transitioning toward becoming Accountable Care Organizations. He has considerable experience in assisting hospitals and health systems integrate behavioral-health services with primary care and address the challenges of care delivery and changing patterns of reimbursement under health reform.
Dr. Mirin is the author of more than 140 professional papers and the author or editor of 9 books and monographs. He has lectured frequently at academic medical centers and national healthcare meetings on organizational change, health policy, the role of research in clinical care and other healthcare issues.
He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists and has served on numerous boards, including the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association, the APA Institute for Research and Education and the Health Care Quality Alliance.He also chaired the Governing Council Section for Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Services of the American Hospital Association and served on the Professional and Technical Advisory Committee of the Hospital Accreditation Program of the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO).
Awards and honors include the Presidential Award for Research of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals; the McLean Hospital Award, the Presidential Award of the American Psychiatric Association and the Administrative Psychiatry Award of the American Psychiatric Association and the Association of Psychiatric Administrators.
H. Tom O’Connor
Senior Adviser
H. Tom O’Connor brings to Cambridge Management Group decades of experience as a healthcare-sector executive and entrepreneur. As hospitals, physician groups, clinics, insurers and other organizations in the sector reorganize themselves to deal with new reimbursement, regulatory, demographic and technological challenges, Mr. O’Connor’s experience in creating as well as managing enterprises is invaluable as clients seek new sources of revenue.
Mr. O’Connor is managing member of Lenus, LLC, which advises emerging healthcare companies on the strategy and tactics needed to develop their business for long-term growth, by, among other strategies, attracting institutional investors. At Lenus, he serves when needed as part of enterprises’ executive teams.
His work has included being a founder of Medical Excellence, which provides high- end concierge healthcare services to wealthy residents in emerging growth nations in partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital, New York Hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Stanford Heath Care and UCLA Medical Center. Its first rollout was in Russia.
He has also advised and managed a medical-textile business; acquired a medical-finance business and served as its CEO, and led an acquisition company established to acquire a new and safer alternative to artificial spinal-disc implants.
Tom O’Connor was a co-founder of Atlantic Medical Capital, LP, a private-equity fund focused on sub-acute-care, medical-informatics and insurance verticals and vice president at GE Capital in the Medical Markets Group of the Corporate Finance Division. There he managed new direct equity and debt investments for a $1 billion healthcare investment portfolio.
He began his career as an investment banker at Prudential Securities, where he was a co-founder and first vice president in the Healthcare Group. His main client was Hospital Corp. of America, for which he worked on every major financing, acquisition and divestiture for a decade.
Mr. O’Connor has an MBA in finance and accounting from Columbia University and a BA from Union College, where he majored in economics and political science.
James Marcus Pierson, M.D.
Senior Adviser
For the last 18 years Dr. Pierson has held executive positions at PeaceHealth, a regional healthcare system in northwest Washington State.
His work has always been focused on organizational learning and toward the whole community served by healthcare organizations.
He led in creating a countywide integrated delivery system, and in developing community-wide, patient-centered technologies, including an electronic medical-record system, secure whole-county health Intranet, electronic personal-health records and a electronic personalized-care-management system. CMG clients seek his advice as they redesign care and realign clinicians to manage population health.
Dr. Pierson led the Whatcom County’s Pursuing Perfection project for five years, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and oversight by healthcare reformer Don Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). As a direct outcome of that learning Marc recruited Nik Ivancic to Whatcom County and they worked with various institutions and individuals to create the Shared Care Plan, a groundbreaking, patient-centered personal-health-record system. The Shared Care Plan was an inspiration for Washington State’s Health Record Bank project and influenced Microsoft’s development of HealthVault.
His main career interest remains designing and implementing organizational and technical support for people in communities so that patients can better care for themselves in collaborative and convenient ways. Dr. Pierson believes that this is essential for the success of accountable-care programs.
Marc Pierson is a board-certified emergency physician and internist.
He trained at Indiana University Medical School and Parkland Memorial Hospital, in Dallas.
Susan E. Porth
Senior Adviser
Susan E. Porth, a CMG senior adviser, helps clients integrate financing, capital and business planning, budgeting and performance management.
She is well known for her ability to link financial imperatives to an organization’s strategic goals. She can quickly identify challenges in organizational performance, market position and leadership development and articulate the financial, general-management and governance implications of these challenges.
CMG clients especially appreciate Ms. Porth’s ability to craft approaches for, and train frontline physician and executive leaders in, change management.
Ms. Porth was senior vice president for corporate services and chief financial officer of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, where she was a member of the senior management of Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser Permanente is a management partnership of Kaiser Hospitals and Health Plans and regional Permanente Medical Groups. She was later executive vice president and CFO of United Behavioral Health.
Currently, Ms. Porth is a consultant to a specialty food retailer. She also worked in the forest-products industry and as an associate at a San Francisco law firm, where her focus was transactional and governance matters.
At Kaiser Permanente, Ms. Porth helped establish business planning in the operating units. She also led initiatives to improve capital planning, which resulted in a significant reduction in capital spending and cutting central administrative costs by 10 percent. She was a member of the senior management team that significantly improved Kaiser Permanente’s competitive position by focusing on member service and cost containment.
At United Behavioral Health, she led a company-wide effort to improve member and provider service and reduce costs through process redesign, while building a sense of internal ownership and capacity to implement change. Examples of outcomes from this initiative include a 50 percent reduction in the data collected for care management, a 25 percent reduction in claims-processing costs, reduced intake costs and improved response time for members.
Ms. Porth is a graduate of Smith College and holds an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School and a J.D. from the law school of the University of California at Berkeley. She is a former trustee of Smith College, where she chaired the audit committee. Ms. Porth is also a former board member of the Oakland Ballet and the Harvard Business School Alumni Association and former president of the Smith College Alumni Association.
Tad Simons
Senior Adviser
Tad Simons, a co-founder and a managing director of Pyxera Inc. (www.pyxera.com), is a senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group (CMG).
Pyxera, based in Mountain View, Calif., is a consulting and development corporation dedicated to creating innovative offerings for healthcare and the life sciences. Its clients span virtually the entire sector: device, diagnostic and pharmaceutical suppliers, healthcare providers, non-clinical services and biotechnology.
Dr. Simons has designed healthcare products since 1982. Before co-founding Pyxera, he was co-leader in IDEO’s Global Health Practice for more than 11 years, as its activity there grew more than seven-fold, with work expanding across healthcare and life sciences (pharmaceuticals, devices, diagnostics, biotechnology, consumer health and hospital systems).
He has deep and wide technical and business knowledge across healthcare and the life sciences, along with keen knowledge of the competitive business landscape and the regulatory process. With experience in program management and physiological measurements, he has been a technical designer and leader on many medical projects, including blood-pressure systems, oxygen saturation, infusions systems, cardiology products, in-vitro diagnostic measurements and airway gas monitoring for anesthesia. Dr. Simons has spoken at many health forums.
His work has resulted in 19 U.S. patents. Current projects involve examining healthcare systems, helping companies build internal innovation capabilities and supporting teams that bring together a wide range of human and technical disciplines.
Before joining IDEO, Dr. Simons applied his design, clinical and business experience to research and strategic planning for healthcare and life sciences at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.
He holds a bachelor of science degree (with distinction) and a Ph.D. degree, both in mechanical engineering, from Stanford University and an M.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a Daniel & Florence Guggenheim Fellow.
Ellen C. Skinner
Senior Adviser
Ellen C. Skinner is an innovative healthcare executive and consultant with a proven record of developing and managing collaborative projects across the sector in a time of revolutionary change in healthcare.
She brings to Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com) practical experience and qualitative and quantitative skills particularly valuable as healthcare moves more rapidly to fee for value from fee for service, and as the regulatory climate at the federal and state levels seems to change daily. She is intimately familiar with private- and public-sector healthcare organizations, and the inter-actions between those sectors.
Ms. Skinner is currently principal consultant for Connected Health Strategies, which provides planning and business-development services to healthcare organizations to help solve quality, access and cost problems.
She previously served as executive director of the nationally recognized program “MBA for Executives: Leadership in Healthcare,’’ at the Yale University School of Management, where she also lectured on the economics of healthcare and on creating value in healthcare delivery, and advised students.
Ms. Skinner has also led development and oversight of Health Net of the Northeast’s strategy and business plan and directed a portfolio for commercial and government initiatives.
She has served as assistant vice president for national contracting and provider networks at CIGNA HealthCare, where her work included improving provider satisfaction through increased communications and implementing process upgrades to increase claim accuracy and otherwise improve service.
As an executive at the Yale Medical School, she led the development of a physician-governed organization of more than 500 doctors to facilitate contracting and standards of care and helped develop and implement a start-up provider-sponsored Medicaid managed-care organization.
Ellen Skinner has a master’s degree in public and private management from the Yale University School of Management and a bachelor of arts degree, with a major in sociology, from Southern Connecticut State University.
Don Westwood
Senior Adviser
Don Westwood, a co-founder and a managing director of Pyxera Inc. (www.pyxera.com), is a Cambridge Management Group (CMG) senior adviser.
Pyxera, based in Mountain View, Calif., is a consulting and development corporation dedicated to creating innovative offerings for healthcare and the life sciences. Its clients span virtually the entire sector: device, diagnostic and pharmaceutical suppliers, healthcare providers, non-clinical services and biotechnology.
Before co-founding Pyxera, Don Westwood was a senior leader at IDEO for 20 years, and the co-director of IDEO’s global Health Practice (about 25% of IDEO’s total business). Mr. Westwood has a keen knowledge of the realities of innovation and product development — from early conceptualization through implementation — and an exceptional record of leadership and mentorship of teams.
A widely recognized designer and project manager, he was responsible for design teams working in all domains of health (devices, pharma, diagnostics and services), and for providing design mentorship, portfolio leadership and relationship management for major clients. Project work has included infusion systems, drug-delivery systems, diabetes care, tools for cardiac care and consumer electronics.
Mr. Westwood’s work has resulted in 10 patents, from disk-drive servo-mechanisms to medical disposables. Before Pyxera, he participated in two other successful start-up ventures, Quantum Corp. and Plus Development Corp., where he gained valuable experience in high-volume manufacturing.
He holds a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California.
Robert B. Whitcomb
Senior Adviser
Bob, a Cambridge Management Group partner, assists CMG and its clients in communications and marketing. CMG’s easily accessible, high-value content reflects dialogue and learning shared with physicians and other clinicians and healthcare executives across America. In his role, Bob is in touch with clients and partners in all aspects of CMG’s practice. He has a longtime interest in healthcare matters.
Bob recently closed out a career as vice president and editorial-page editor for The Providence Journal Co., where he directed all aspects of the Commentary pages and related Web services and helped in some corporate-wide matters. In his career, Bob has established strong connections with thought leaders in most aspects of American cultural, political and economic life.
Twice named “best editorial writer in New England,” Bob has been a frequent member of WGBH (PBS affiliate in Boston) radio forums and panels assembled by other media outlets in New England and Washington. Bob has done freelance writing for Miller-McCune magazine (now Pacific Standard), The Weekly Standard, The New York Times, Newsweek, MBA Publications and many other outlets. Some of it has been on healthcare matters. He also served as managing editor of several Manisses Communications Group healthcare newsletters and as co-host of a weekly public-affairs TV show on the local ABC affiliate.
Bob was secretary of the Media Thinking Group of the Aga Khan University. He was asked to help profile international media education and to propose new structures for media-business models for the Third World. He is a member of founding Advisory Board of the new Nairobi-based Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications. Bob has lectured at Brown, Harvard, and Dartmouth and taught journalism at Providence College.
Bob started his journalism career as a writer at the Boston Herald Tribune, followed by increasingly visible roles at Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, as an editor at The Wall Street Journal and as the financial editor of the International Herald Tribune, based in Paris.
Bob is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.