Speaker Bios

 

Robert J. Rubin, MD 
Summit moderator Robert J. Rubin, MD, is a clinical professor of medicine at Georgetown University. Dr. Rubin has had a distinguished career in public health and policy as well as in clinical practice. He served as assistant secretary for health and human services during the early 1980s concurrent with his appointment as assistant surgeon general during the Reagan administration. In addition, he has served as an epidemic intelligence service officer at the Centers for Disease Control, and as a consultant to the U.S. Senate for human resource issues.

After his career in public service, Rubin was a consultant with ICF until 2001, and served as president of a merged Lewin-ICF healthcare consulting firm. A winner of the bronze medal from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1983, he is board certified in internal medicine and nephrology. Rubin served as assistant dean for government affairs at Tufts University, then in 1981 joined the Georgetown University School of Medicine as a visiting faculty member, later becoming a clinical professor in 1995.

Session I: The Growing Need for Evidence

Naomi Aronson, PhD 
Naomi Aronson is the executive director of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association Technology Evaluation Center (TEC; Chicago). She has overseen TEC’s development as a nationally recognized technology assessment program and an Evidence-Based Practice Center of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Aronson has directed more than 300 technology assessments and 10 evidence reports for AHRQ. She has published articles in Academic Radiology, Annals of Internal Medicine, Cancer, Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, Journal of Family Practice, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. She represented the private sector on a U.S. Agency for International Development team providing technical assistance to the Hungarian government on building evidence-based medicine capacity in the national health insurance system. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine forum on drug discovery translation and development, the steering committee of AHRQ’s Chicago-area Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) research center, and the National Business Group on Health committee on evidence-based benefit design.

Previously, Aronson was a faculty member at Northwestern University, specializing in sociology of science and medicine. She was also a postdoctoral fellow in the science, technology, and society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received research awards from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Aronson’s academic research focused on how the organization of scientific specialties in biomedical and clinical research affects the process of scientific discovery.

John F. P. Bridges, PhD
John Bridges is an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. Born and educated in Australia, he received his PhD in health economics from the City University of New York. In 2002 he was appointed assistant professor in health services research at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. In 2004 he moved to the University of Heidelberg School of Medicine to head a group of young researchers in international health economics and outcomes research. In 2006 he joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins, where he continues his research and international collaborations in outcomes research.

Bridges’s research is concentrated in four key areas. First, he has argued for the inclusion of patient preferences in outcomes research and health technology assessment (HTA). Second he has studied the role that risk and uncertainty should play in decision making (including cost-effectiveness analysis), using methods from finance theory to demonstrate how risk could be measured and managed. Third, he has been concerned with the effects of HTA on innovation, especially given that some countries use HTA to delay market access. And fourth, he has applied econometric theory to the risk adjustment of adverse events with specific attention on the effects that organization and team characteristics have on the quality of care.

Bridges is active in the leadership of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). He is the founding editor of The Patient: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, and serves on the editorial boards of Applied Health Economics & Health Policy, the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Healthcare, and PharmacoEconomics. He is an active member of Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi), and the association’s patient and citizen involvement interest group. He regularly presents on the importance of accounting for the patient’s perspective at HTAi’s conferences.

J. Michael McGinnis, MD 
Michael McGinnis is a physician, epidemiologist, and long-time contributor to national and international health programs and policy. He now is senior scholar and director of the Institute of Medicine’s roundtable on evidence-based medicine, as well as an elected member of the institute. Much of his policy leadership stems from his four-administration tenure—perhaps unique among federal appointees—with continuous service through the Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations as the key point person for disease prevention and health promotion. Several still-prominent initiatives were launched under his guidance, including the Healthy People national goals and objectives process, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Internationally, he served as epidemiologist and state director for the World Health Organization’s successful smallpox eradication program in India, and as chair of the international task force to rebuild the health and human services sector in post-war Bosnia.

From 1999 to 2005, McGinnis was senior vice president and founding director of the health group at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. His research interests are in the determinants of health and the rational allocation of social resources, and he has published widely.

McGinnis has taught in visiting or adjunct capacities at George Washington, UCLA, Princeton, and Duke universities. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, the UCLA Medical School, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Session II: Shaping the Evidence

John E. Calfee, PhD 
Jack Calfee is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington, DC), and an economist who studies FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, along with the economics of tobacco, tort liability, and patents. He previously worked in the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught marketing and consumer behavior at the business schools of the University of Maryland at College Park and Boston University.

Calfee’s current writings are mostly on pharmaceutical markets and FDA regulation, but his academic articles and opinion pieces have covered a variety of topics, from patent law and tort liability to advertising and consumer information. He is the author of Prices, Markets, and the Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000) and a coauthor of Biotechnology and the Patent System (AEI Press, 2007). Calfee also writes regularly for AEI’s health policy outlook series. He has testified before Congress and federal agencies on various topics, including alcohol advertising; biodefense vaccine research; international drug prices; and, most recently, FDA oversight of drug safety.

Gregory de Lissovoy, PhD 
Greg de Lissovoy is vice president for health technology at United BioSource Corp. (UBC; Bethesda, MD) and a senior research scientist in the UBC Center for Health Economics and Policy. His role at UBC is to collaborate with medical device and diagnostic industry clients in developing strategy to demonstrate the clinical, economic, and humanistic value of innovative healthcare technology.

Dr. de Lissovoy received his PhD in health economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his dissertation research focused on growth of the Medicare end-stage renal disease program as a technology diffusion process. Prior to joining UBC he was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He currently holds adjunct faculty appointments at both the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

Dr. de Lissovoy is a member of the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) and the International Society for Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research (ISPOR).

Bill Fox, JD 
Bill Fox is executive director of the National Center for Patient Interactive Research (CPIR; Philadelphia), a nonprofit organization founded on the belief that the patient must be a hard-wired participant in the transformation of healthcare technology. He also serves as a workgroup chair for the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative’s Center for eHealth Information Adoption and Exchange, and on URAC’s advisory board on patient-centered care measurement.

Prior to joining CPIR, Fox was a vice president at Maximus Federal, where he led varied federal and state healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse efforts, including the New York fraud, waste, and abuse recovery and detection project, working as a strategic partner with the newly formed office of Medicaid inspector general and New York inspector general James G. Sheehan, to assist the state in combating fraud, waste and abuse in its $45 billion Medicaid program. Earlier still, Mr. Fox was assistant chief of economic and cyber crime in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, and a special assistant U.S. attorney. Prior to joining the district attorney’s office, Fox was a partner in the law firm of Post and Schell (Philadelphia), where he handled cases involving medical fraud rings for private insurers such as State Farm, Allstate, and Unum Provident. Fox is a frequent speaker on healthcare fraud, technology, and policy issues, for groups such as the National Healthcare AntiFraud Association and the American Bar Association.

Session III: Evidence in the Media

A. Mark Fendrick, MD 
Mark Fendrick, MD, is a professor of internal medicine and health management and policy at the University of Michigan, where he is codirector of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design. Fendrick received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and holds a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past scholar of the Robert Wood Johnson and the Charles Dana Foundations, and has consulted for government, payers, and industry. In grant-sponsored work, Fendrick has studied the role of technology in healthcare costs, patient safety, and changing practice patterns.

Mark McCarty 
Mark McCarty is the Washington editor of Medical Device Daily, a trade publication published by AHC Media (Atlanta). He has held this position for three and a half years, covering Congress, the Supreme Court, a variety of federal agencies (including FDA and CMS), as well as industry and medical society meetings.

McCarty previously served for three years as the managing editor of Warning Letter Bulletin and Inspection Monitor, publications of Washington Information Source (Leesburg, VA). These publications reviewed warning letters and establishment inspection reports related to FDA inspections of manufacturing facilities operated by makers of devices, pharmaceuticals, and biologics. McCarty also wrote substantially for the publisher’s Validation Times newsletter, which addressed validation issues for all three industries.

McCarty also worked as a consultant with the Gold Sheet, a pharmaceutical industry newsletter published by FDC Reports (Bridgewater, NJ), and worked with Circle Solutions Inc. (McLean, VA), a government contractor with multiple contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services. He has also covered disease states extensively for a number of advocacy groups, including the Down Syndrome Association of Atlanta, the Pituitary Network Association, and Pituitary Disorder Education and Support. McCarty holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Florida State University.

John J. Whyte, MD 
John J. Whyte, MD, is the chief medical expert and vice president for health and medical education at Discovery Channel, part of the media conglomerate Discovery Communications. In this role, he develops, designs, and delivers educational programming that appeals to both a medical and lay audience. This includes television shows, online content, and DVDs.

Prior to joining Discovery, Whyte was in the immediate office of the director at the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality. He served as medical advisor and director of the council on private sector initiatives to improve the safety, security, and quality of healthcare. Prior to this assignment, Whyte was acting director of the division of medical items and devices in the coverage and analysis group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In his role at CMS, Whyte made recommendations as to whether or not the Medicare program should pay for certain procedures, equipment, or services. His division was responsible for durable medical equipment, orthotics/prosthetics, drugs/biologics/therapeutics, medical items, laboratory tests, and nonimplantable devices. As division director as well as medical officer and senior advisor, Whyte was responsible for more national coverage decisions than any other CMS staff.

Whyte is a board-certified internist. He completed an internal medicine residency at Duke University Medical Center, and earned a masters of public health in health policy and management at Harvard University School of Public Health. Prior to arriving in Washington, DC, Whyte was a health services research fellow and attending physician in the department of medicine at Stanford University. He has written extensively in the medical and lay press on health policy issues.

Session IV: Using Evidence to Reshape Healthcare

Steve E. Phurrough, MD 
Steve Phurrough, MD, is a medical officer in the center for outcomes and effectiveness at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Phurrough joined AHRQ in March 2009 and works on effective healthcare projects, including comparative effectiveness research. Prior to joining AHRQ, Phurrough was director of the coverage and analysis group at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Using evidence-based medicine principles, Phurrough assisted in developing national policy on the appropriate devices, diagnostics and procedures that should be provided by the Medicare program. Phurrough joined CMS in 2001 as director of the division of medical and surgical services in the coverage and analysis group, after completing a career in the United States Army Medical Department.

Phurrough was responsible for developing and implementing the CMS concept of coverage with evidence development, which allows coverage of innovative technologies sooner if the technology is provided in a research study. In addition, he led in the establishment of national registries in an attempt to verify outcomes of clinical trials in real-world settings. Phurrough received his MD from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and earned a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He is board certified by the American Board of Family Practice and is certified as a physician executive by the American College of Physician Executives.

Ted R. Mannen 
Ted Mannen is a Washington, DC-based partner of the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and of that firm’s business and policy advisory division, Manatt Health Solutions. He has nearly 30 years of diverse experience in healthcare law, policy, and communications:

As executive vice president and general counsel of the international trade association now known as AdvaMed, he represented healthcare technology companies on a range of Medicare and other regulatory issues. More recently, he helped plan a client’s successful challenge to Medicare’s longstanding ‘least costly alternative’ policy.

Mannen served as an aide on banking committee matters to former U.S. Senator Adlai E. Stevenson and, as an attorney for the house office of the legislative counsel, drafted legislation for the judiciary committee. Today, he drafts legislation and related materials for a variety of healthcare organizations. As president of two consulting firms, Mannen helped device, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical companies plan the introduction of their innovations into reimbursed markets. In his current work, he assists clients in developing plans for addressing requirements of Medicare and other third-party payers.

Mannen helps Manatt deploy digital surveillance tools to track healthcare developments. He founded and manages the popular policy Web site, HealthHombre (www.healthhombre.com).

Mannen is a cum laude graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law, where he served as notes and comments editor of the Northwestern University Law Review.

Margo Thorning, PhD 
Margo Thorning, PhD, is senior vice president and chief economist with the American Council for Capital Formation (Washington, DC) and director of research for its public policy think tank. She also serves as the managing director of the International Council for Capital Formation, a new think tank incorporated in Brussels. The ICCF is an affiliate of the ACCF.

In North America, Thorning has testified as an expert witness on capital formation and environmental issues before various U.S. congressional committees. She recently made a presentation “Investing in Energy and Industrial Development: Challenges and Opportunities” at a meeting of the United Nations commission on sustainable development. She also served on the Department of Energy’s electricity advisory board’s subcommittee on standards of conduct and corporate practices. She has also testified before the senate of Canada on that country’s proposals for tax reform.

Thorning is an internationally recognized expert on tax, environmental, and competitiveness issues. She writes and lectures on tax and economic policy, is frequently quoted in publications such as the Financial Times, Suddeutsche Zeitung, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, and has appeared internationally on public affairs news programs. Thorning has made presentations on the economic impact of climate change policy at forums sponsored by the ICCF in China, India, other Asian countries, the European Union, and Russia.

Thorning is coeditor of numerous books on tax and environmental policy, including Climate Change Policy and Economic Growth: A Way Forward to Ensure Both (ICCF, 2005) and The U.S. Savings Challenge: Policy Options for Productivity and Growth (Westview Press, 1990).

Previously, Thorning served at the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Federal Trade Commission. She received a BA from Texas Christian University, an MA in economics from the University of Texas, and a PhD in economics from the University of Georgia.