
David A. Asch, MD, MBA
Executive Director
Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation
Opening talk and Topic # 1 - Design that Drives Engagement
Topic # 2 - Social Networks That Enable Engagement
Topic # 3 - Real Teams That Build Engagement and Closing Remarks
Executive Director
Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation
VP Chief Quality Officer; Investigator, Institute for Health Research
Colorado Permanente Medical Group; Kaiser Permanente Colorado
Professor of Internal Medicine and Health Behavior and Health Education
University of Michigan
Regional Medical Director of Quality and Clinical Analysis
Southern California Permanente Medical Group
Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board Co-Chair, NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery; Chief Medical Officer, Press Ganey Associates; Editorial Board, New England Journal of Medicine
Executive Editor, NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery; Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Clinical Operations
Kaiser Permanente, Southern California
Founders President's Distinguished Professor; Vice Chairman Health Policy, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy; Theme Leader for Patient Engagement and Event Chair
Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, Leonard Davis Institute; Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School, Pennsylvania; NEJM Catalyst
David Asch is Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation. He is the John Morgan Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine and Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School.
Dr. Asch’s research aims to understand and improve how physicians and patients make medical choices in clinical, financial, and ethically charged settings, including the adoption of new pharmaceuticals or medical technologies, the purchase of insurance, and personal health behaviors. His research combines elements of economic analysis with psychological theory and marketing in the field now called behavioral economics. He is the author of more than 300 published papers.
He teaches health policy at the Wharton School and he practices internal medicine at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he created and from 2001 to 2012 directed the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion—the Department of Veterans Affairs’ national center to support vulnerable populations and reduce racial disparities. From 1998 to 2012 he was Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
He has received numerous awards for teaching, research, and innovation at the University of Pennsylvania and nationally. He is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly, Institute of Medicine).
Dr. Asch received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, his MD from Weill-Cornell Medical College, and his MBA in Health Care Management and Decision Sciences from the Wharton School. He was a resident in Internal Medicine and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wendolyn S. Gozansky, MD, MPH is Vice President and Chief Quality Officer for the Colorado Permanente Medical Group (CPMG). She is responsible for the quality improvement and oversight activities of this 1100+ multispecialty physician group that delivers care to 670,000+ members in the Kaiser Permanente Colorado (KPCO) region. Dr. Gozansky continues to build on KPCO’s exceptional quality through a focus on the member, critical evaluation of existing literature and best practices, robust data and reporting, integration of research into operations, and leveraging both people and technology to create standardized systems of care that meet the triple aim mission.
Prior to coming to CPMG in 2010, Dr. Gozansky was an Associate Professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. A desire to shift her research from studies of physiologic outcomes to a stronger focus on directly improving the health of seniors led her to join the KPCO Institute for Health Research. As a board certified internist and geriatrician, Dr. Gozansky practices in CPMG’s Skilled Nursing Facility Rehabilitation Service. She graduated from Smith College as a Women’s Studies major, received medical and public health degrees from Tufts University School of Medicine, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Colorado.
At KPCO, she has served as Operations Chief overseeing Continuing Care, Palliative Care, & Geriatrics strategy for the region and as Medical Director of the Special Needs Plan. As a National Permanente Quality leader, Dr. Gozansky is currently championing the interregional implementation of collaborative care models for depression management and working to optimize approaches to caring for complex, high needs patients within an integrated delivery system.
Dr. Michele Heisler received her MD degree from Harvard University and MPA degree from Princeton University. She completed residency training in Internal Medicine and health services research training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar from 2000-2002 at the University of Michigan Health System.
Before her medical training Dr. Heisler worked for the United Nations Human Rights Commission and spent four years as a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation helping develop and strengthen human rights organizations and programs in Latin America and the Caribbean.
She has volunteered for PHR since medical school, when she participated in a human rights investigation in Turkey. Since then Dr. Heisler has helped analyze data and write reports for a number of PHR investigations.
She is a Professor of Internal Medicine and Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan medical school and research scientist at the Ann Arbor VA's Center for Clinical Management Research. She is Co-Director of the University of Michigan's Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Clinical Scholars Program, and Associate Director of the UM Medical School's Global REACH program.
Dr. Heisler's research focuses on developing and evaluating health system and behavioral interventions to enhance self-management support for patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart failure, and she currently is leading several federally funded randomized controlled effectiveness studies examining different models. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed studies in medical and public health journals.
Dr. Thomas Lee is Chief Medical Officer of Press Ganey and an internist and cardiologist who practices at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is a Professor of Medicine, part time, at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to joining Press Ganey, he served as Network President for Partners Healthcare System and CEO for Partners Community HealthCare, Inc., the integrated delivery system founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of Geisinger Health System, Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Geisinger Health Plan, Geisinger Quality Options, Inc., and Geisinger Indemnity Insurance Company Board of Directors. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Health Leads; the Board of Overseers of Weill Cornell Medical College; the Special Medical Advisory Group (SMAG) of the Veterans Administration; and the Panel of Health Advisors of the Congressional Budget Office. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the New England Journal of Medicine.
He is the author of more than 300 academic articles and four books, Chaos and Organization in Health Care, Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, An Epidemic of Empathy in Healthcare, and The Good Doctor.
Named in his honor, the Thomas H. Lee Award for Excellence in Primary Care is given each year to recognize a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who meets the needs of his or her patients exceptionally well.
Tom holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Science from Harvard College, a medical degree from Cornell University Medical College, and a master’s degree in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. He lives in Milton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr. Soheyla Gharib, who is Chief of Medicine at Harvard University Health Services. The couple has three daughters.
Namita Seth Mohta, MD, is a physician executive with expertise in health care delivery transformation. As the Executive Editor for NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery, she is part of the founding leadership team and has responsibility for content strategy and quality. She has been part of the founding Population Health and ACO leadership teams at both Partners Health Care and the New England Quality Care Alliance (Tufts Medical Center), both in Boston. Her responsibilities have included designing and implementing ACO strategies for Medicare, Medicaid, and Commercial populations, with a focus on scaling tailored clinical interventions, integrating analytics and measurement, and leading change management and team-based care with providers. Dr. Mohta also has industry experience as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. She often consults with start-ups (currently with PatientPing, GNS Healthcare, and Day Health Strategies) to provide strategic and technical expertise and leadership. Dr. Mohta practices internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is faculty at The Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences and at Harvard Medical School. She completed her Internal Medicine and Primary Care residency training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Mohta is a graduate of Yale College and Yale School of Medicine.
Nirav R. Shah, MD, MPH, is the Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Clinical Operations for Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California region, a $24B health system with 14 hospitals, 168 medical offices and over 4 million members. He oversees health plan and hospital quality, service, accreditation, regulatory compliance, and licensure, as well as nursing, the continuum of care, and the effective use of technology, data, and analytics to produce better patient health outcomes. He also serves as a key liaison with the Southern California Permanente Medical Group for medical education, graduate medical education, and research as well as the planned new Kaiser Permanente Medical School.
Dr. Shah is board-certified in Internal Medicine and is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale School of Medicine. He has been an RWJ Clinical Scholar at UCLA, attending physician at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, associate investigator at Geisinger Health in central Pennsylvania, and on the faculty of NYU Medical Center in the section of value and comparative effectiveness. Most recently, he served as commissioner of the New York State Department of Health.
Dr. Shah is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served as a director for dozens of public and private institutions, as the chairman of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant review panels, on the editorial boards of medical journals, received numerous NIH grants, and published over 100 peer-reviewed articles. He is a nationally recognized thought leader in patient safety and quality, health information technology, population health, and the strategies required to transition to lower-cost, patient-centered health care.
Dr. Volpp is the founding Director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, Division Chief of Health Policy for the Department of Medical Ethics and Policy, and the Founders President's Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine and Health Care Management at the Wharton School of the university of Pennsylvania. He is a board certified practicing physician at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.
Dr. Volpp's work focuses on developing and testing innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics in improving patient health behavior and affecting provider performance. He has led projects with a variety of employers, insurers, health systems, and consumer companies in testing the impact of different behavioral economic strategies on behavior. He has competitively been awarded more than $60 million to lead or co-lead studies funded by the NIH; the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation; the CDC; VA Health Services Research and Development; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Hewlett Foundation; the Commonwealth Foundation; the Aetna Foundation; Mckinsey; CVS Caremark; Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield; Hawaii Medical Services Association; Merck; Humana; Aramark; Weight Watchers; and Discovery (South Africa).
Dr. Volpp has published more than 200 articles, book chapters, and commentaries, and his work has been covered by media outlets worldwide. His work has served as the foundation for numerous widely implemented programs such as benefit design initiatives using financial incentives for smoking cessation among GE and CVS employees, a prescription refill synchronization program for Humana members, a simple health insurance plan called "Humana Simplicity", and an approach to increase medication refills using enhanced active choice among CVS members.
Dr. Volpp's work has been recognized by a number of awards including the Matilda White Riley Award for career achievement by the Office of Social and Behavioral Science at NIH and the Association for Clinical and Translational Science Distinguished Investigator Award for Clinical and Translational Science. Volpp is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the Association of American Physicians (AAP), and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academy of Sciences (IOM). He has served as an advisor to many different health plans, employers, and consumer companies and is a principal of the behavioral economic consulting firm VALHealth.