Mortality Measurement: Participants

Meeting Participants

Cosponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and Institute for Healthcare Improvement

November 3, 2008

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Amy Rosen, Ph.D.
Dr. Amy Rosen is Professor of Health Policy and Management at Boston University School of Public Health and a researcher at the Center for Health Quality, Outcomes and Economic Research. She has conducted health services research projects involving the development and use of risk-adjustment models used to compare quality of care delivery in different settings: hospital, long-term care, and ambulatory care. Among her studies, she has evaluated the quality of care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries who received surgical procedures, for which a measure called "adverse events" became an important way to screen for potential instances of poor quality in this population. In long-term care, she developed a risk-adjustment model to predict decline in functional status among long-term care residents in Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) settings. In the ambulatory setting, she evaluated case-mix models currently used for provider profiling, setting capitation rates, and quality assessment. These include the Adjusted Clinical Groups, the Diagnostic Cost Groups, and the Chronic Illness and Disability Payment System. She was a principal investigator of a project developing a psychiatric case-mix measure for the VA used to compare the care that facilities provide to patients with mental health disorders. More recently, Dr. Rosen has worked in the area of patient safety. She has examined the prevalence and incidence of Patient Safety Indicators, developed by AHRQ, in the VA, and is currently evaluating their criterion validity. She is working closely with AHRQ to improve the indicators. She is also working on a study examining the patient safety culture of VA hospitals, as well as the changes in the quality and safety of care resulting from the resident work duty reform legislation. Dr. Rosen received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in sociology.

Barry M. Straube, M.D.
Barry M. Straube, M.D., is currently the Acting Director of the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality (OCSQ) and Acting Chief Medical Officer (CMO) at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). In his OCSQ role, Dr. Straube oversees several major elements of the CMS quality and clinical policy portfolio, including the development of national coverage policies and quality standards for Medicare and Medicaid providers; quality measurement and public reporting initiatives; and manages the Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) program. As Acting Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Straube serves as a senior advisor to the Administrator on clinical and scientific policy .He also cochairs the CMS Council on Technology and Innovation, and serves as Executive Director for the CMS Quality Council, two internal CMS bodies that coordinate policy development on technology and quality, respectively. In addition, Dr. Straube serves as the CMS liaison to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the National Quality Forum (NQF), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society, and several other public and private sector national councils and committees. As the only nephrologist at CMS he also cochairs the End Stage Renal Disease and Clinical Laboratory Open Door Forum and acts as a senior advisor on ESRD and transplantation issues to the agency.

Brent C. James, M.D., M.Stat.
Brent C. James, M.D., M.Stat., Vice President, Medical Research and Continuing Medical Education, Intermountain Health Care (IHC), is also Executive Director of IHC Institute for Health Care Delivery Research. He holds faculty appointments at the University of Utah, School of Medicine, Harvard School of Public Health, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and the University of Sydney, School of Public Health in Australia. Through the Intermountain Advanced Training Program in Clinical Practice Improvement, Dr. James has trained almost 2,000 senior physician, nursing, and administrative executives in clinical management methods. Before joining IHC, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Professor Sir Brian Jarman, OBE, FRCP, FRCGP
Professor Sir Brian Jarman, OBE, FRCP, FRCGP, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), was Head of the of Primary Care and Populations Health Sciences Division in the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London and now heads Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College, which calculates a wide range of international indices of health care, including the Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) for hospitals in several countries (including United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Netherlands, and Canada). He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and did a Ph.D. in Geophysics at Imperial College and then worked for some years as an exploration geophysicist in the Sahara (Libya) and elsewhere. After changing to medicine he did his M.B.B.S. at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London (now part of Imperial College), and an exchange at Harvard Medical School. His hospital posts included St May's Hospital and the Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, as a medical resident. He has worked on the development of socioeconomic indicators of health status (the Under Privileged Area score), on the provision of beds in London and on hospital mortality rates. He was a panel member of the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry. He was President of the British Medical Association (2003-2004) and has worked with IHI since 2001.

Bruce N. Davidson, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.Pl.
Bruce Davidson is Director of the Resource and Outcomes Management Department for the Cedars-Sinai Health System, a position he has held since 1996. Currently, he is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Health Services Department at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Public Health, where he teaches Quality Improvement and Informatics for the Executive Master's Program. Dr. Davidson has 30 years of experience in health services delivery and evaluation, with hands-on experience in leading, supporting, and evaluating patient care process improvement initiatives, as well as the delivery of patient care services in both inpatient and outpatient settings.

In his present position, he is responsible for leading a department of 24 in support of the development and implementation of initiatives designed to promote cost-effective, high quality medical care, with a focus on measurement and statistical methodology. He has published articles in the areas of medical treatment effectiveness, decisionmaking in health care, and measurement for quality improvement, with a recent focus on information management. He serves on the Board of Directors for the annual MIT International Conference on Information Quality, and is also the Chair of the Committee on Health Services Research in the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association.

Dr. Davidson holds a Ph.D. in Health Services Research from the UCLA School of Public Health and was a Pew Health Policy Fellow at the RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study. He also holds a master's degree in Public Health from UCLA with an emphasis in Population and Family Health, and a master's degree in Urban Planning from USC with an emphasis in Social Policy and Planning Methodology. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D.
Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D., was appointed Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) on February 5, 2003. Prior to her appointment, Dr. Clancy had served as AHRQ's Acting Director since March 2002 and previously was Director of the Agency's Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research (COER).

Dr. Clancy, who is a general internist and health services researcher, is a graduate of Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Following clinical training in internal medicine, Dr. Clancy was a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond before joining AHRQ in 1990.

Cathy Schoen
Cathy Schoen is senior vice president at The Commonwealth Fund. She is a member of the Fund's executive management team and research director of the Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System. Her work includes strategic oversight and management of surveys, research and policy initiatives to track health system performance. From 1998 through 2005, she directed the Fund's Task Force on the Future of Health Insurance. Prior to joining the Fund in 1995, Ms. Schoen taught health economics at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) School of Public Health and directed special projects at the UMASS Labor Relations and Research Center. During the 1980s, she directed the Service Employees International Union's research and policy department. In the late 1970s, she was on the staff of President Carter's national health insurance task force, where she oversaw analysis and policy development. Prior to Federal service, she was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She has authored numerous publications on health policy issues, insurance, and national/international health system performance and coauthored the book Health and the War on Poverty. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Smith College and a graduate degree in economics from Boston College.

Christine Vogeli, Ph.D.
Dr. Vogeli is a health services researcher whose principal interests include analyzing data to gain a better understanding of patterns of care, quality of care, and health care costs. She is an expert in large administrative databases and looks at ways to maximize their utility to further health care quality assessment and improvement, especially for racial and ethnic minorities and individuals with multiple chronic conditions. Dr. Vogeli has also investigated the validity of physician and hospital performance metrics.

Dr. Vogeli has played a leading role in quality assessment projects within the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Partners Healthcare System and has developed and played a key role in the Partners Quality Report, first launched in Fall 2000. She is developing new measures of heart failure performance based on combined administrative and clinical data for all Partners hospitals and has developed an outcomes reporting system for Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health. Dr. Vogeli has collaborated on research grants funded by The Commonwealth Fund, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and others. This work has lead to publications, as lead or coauthor, in a medical and health policy journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and Health Affairs.

Clarion E. Johnson, M.D.
Dr. Johnson is currently the Global Medical Director, Medicine and Occupational Health Department for Exxon Mobil Corporation. The department delivers services to over 80,000 ExxonMobil and affiliate employees worldwide. In addition to traditional work-related health services, this department delivers travel medicine to the many ExxonMobil employees who are engaged in exploration and production in a number of challenging environments worldwide. The department includes industrial hygiene, drug testing and health promotion services.

Dr. Johnson is board certified in internal medicine, cardiology and occupational medicine. He did his undergraduate work at Sarah Lawrence College where he was student body president. He studied medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. In addition to a cardiology fellowship, Dr. Johnson did a military/basic science fellowship at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research followed by 2 years as a postdoctoral student in the field of microwave research. He has published a variety of articles in various fields.

Dr. Johnson is a Board Member to the Milbank Memorial Fund and National Business Group on Health. He serves as an advisor and lecturer for the "Global Medical Clinic Course" sponsored by Harvard Medical School. He also is on the IOM NIOSH HSE Review Committee. He is a member of the Urban League's advisory board BEEP (Black Executive Exchange Program) and the Joint Commission Advisory Board Globalization of Health Services. He is the past Chairman of the Virginia Health Care Foundation.

David A. Foster, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.T. (ASCP)
David A. Foster, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.T. (ASCP), is Chief Scientist, Center for Healthcare Improvement at Thomson Reuters. Over the past two decades, Dr. Foster has held research and teaching positions at the University of Michigan, and has worked as an epidemiologist at the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and for the World Health Organization on projects around the globe, including Alaska, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. Foster has served on the National Quality Forum's (NQF) Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Performance Measure Criteria, and has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. Since coming to Thomson in 1992, Foster has played a lead role in the development of data sources, study designs, and methodologies that facilitate the delivery of high-quality health care information to providers, payers, employers, and suppliers. Foster received his Ph.D. in Epidemiologic Science from the University of Michigan.

David Harrison, Ph.D.
Dr. David Harrison is Statistician at the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC). ICNARC coordinates the national comparative audit of adult, general critical care units in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland—the Case Mix Programme. This voluntary quality improvement program is active in over 80 percent of units. David's main interests are risk prediction modeling, performance monitoring and reporting, health technology assessment, and evaluation of service delivery and organization in critical care. David graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in mathematics and a Ph.D. in mathematical modeling of disease progression. He has worked for ICNARC since 2002. David is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Medical Statistics Unit of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

David M. Shahian, M.D.
Dr. Shahian is a cardiothoracic surgeon and former CT Department Chair (Lahey Clinic) whose nonclinical activities have focused on health care quality measurement and public reporting. He was a leader in the development of the Massachusetts system for analyzing and reporting coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) results, and he continues to serve as the senior surgical advisor for this program. He also serves as a consultant to the MA Executive Office of Health and Human Services Expert Panel, which is responsible for evaluating potential hospitalwide mortality measures.

Nationally, Dr. Shahian is Chair of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) Adult Cardiac Surgery Database and the STS Quality Measurement Task Force, and he has particular expertise in risk model development and composite quality measures. He was a member of the NQF Cardiac Surgery Project Technical Advisory Panel, and he currently serves on the NQF Composite Measure Steering Committee. He is also a member of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) Performance Measurement Task Force, the ACC/AHA Composite Measure Writing Group, the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) Measurement and Evaluation Committee, and the American Medical Association (AMA) Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI).

Dr. Shahian is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has dual appointments in the Center for Quality and Safety and the Department of Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Donald M. Berwick, M.D., M.P.P., F.R.C.P.
Donald M. Berwick, M.D., M.P.P., F.R.C.P., President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is one of the Nation's leading authorities on health care quality and improvement issues. He is also clinical professor of pediatrics and health care policy at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Berwick has served as vice chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the first "Independent Member" of the Board of Trustees of the American Hospital Association, and as chair on the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. An elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and a former member of the IOM's governing Council, Dr. Berwick now serves on the IOM's Board of Global Health. He served on President Clinton's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry. Cochaired by the secretaries of health and human services and labor, the Commission was charged with developing a broader understanding of issues facing the rapidly evolving health care delivery system and building consensus on ways to assure and improve the quality of health care.

Donald A. Goldmann, M.D.
Donald A. Goldmann, M.D., Senior Vice President, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is responsible for fellowship training, faculty relations, the innovation pipeline, and publications/knowledge management. He is also the principal IHI liaison to a number of strategic allies, including the Joint Commission, CMS, AMA, CDC, and AHRQ. Dr. Goldmann's career in clinical infectious diseases and epidemiology (with a focus on hospital-acquired infections) spans more than three decades. He remains on the infectious diseases clinical staff at Children's Hospital Boston, and he is Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Elizabeth E. Drye, M.D., S.M.
Dr. Drye is Director of Quality Measurement Projects, the Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), and an Associate Research Scientist at Yale University School of Medicine. Before becoming a physician she worked for 8 years in senior governmental public health policy positions in Washington, DC, where she helped lead and manage regulatory, legislative, and governmentwide health initiatives. Her prior policy positions include Chief of Staff and Associate Director for Consumer and Public Health Policy at the White House Domestic Policy Council (1996-1997), Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (1993-1996), and senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency (1989-1992). At Yale she currently directs CORE's work on quality measures for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Dr. Drye received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School and her S.M. in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her residency training in pediatrics at YNHH.

Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Ph.D.
Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Ph.D. is an Associate Director for RAND Health and Director of the Center for Research on Quality in Health Care. She holds the RAND Corporate Chair in Health Care Quality. Dr. McGlynn is an internationally known expert on methods for assessing and reporting on quality of health care delivery at different levels within the health care system. She has led the development of Quality Assurance (QA) Tools, a comprehensive system for assessing the technical quality of medical care for children and adults. The system has been used to evaluate the quality of care delivered by individual physicians, medical groups, managed care plans, and communities. Dr. McGlynn is currently leading a project to examine the methodological and policy issues associated with implementing measures of efficiency and effectiveness of care at the individual physician level. She is participating in a project sponsored by General Electric to design new methods of reimbursement for health care services.

Dr. McGlynn is currently a member of the National Committee for Quality Assurance's Committee on Performance Measurement and she chairs the Technical Advisory Group to this committee. She is a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Board of Medical Examiners' Center for Innovation. She serves on the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation's Assessment/Quality Improvement Working Group. She is on the Board of Little Company of Mary Hospital in Southern California. Dr. McGlynn serves on the editorial boards for Health Services Research and The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly and is a reviewer for many leading journals. Dr. McGlynn received her Ph.D. in public policy analysis in 1988 from the RAND Graduate School.

Eugene A. Kroch, Ph.D.
Eugene A. Kroch, Ph.D., is Vice President and Chief Scientist at Premier, Inc. Prior to its acquisition by Premier in April, 2007, and since 2000 he has been Vice President and Director of Research at CareScience, an organization founded by the Wharton School faculty to disseminate health purchasing and management tools based on research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kroch is also a lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches health economics and econometrics. He is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducts research in the fields of econometrics, public policy, and health economics. He has served as a policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, helping both the Office of the Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Dr. Kroch holds a B.S. degree in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Upon completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Kroch was appointed Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. Four years later he accepted a position on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania jointly in the Department of Economics and at the School of Public and Urban Policy. While at Penn, Dr. Kroch joined the research team assembled at the Leonard Davis Institute to investigate a range of health care issues, including hospital evaluation and the efficiency of health services delivery. He also worked on projects at the Huntsman Center for Global Competition on the effect of the U.S. health care system on the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing in world markets. In 1990 Dr. Kroch left Penn to take a position as Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he directed research on the U.S. domestic service sector and concentrated his own efforts on measurement methodologies. A year and a half later, Dr. Kroch returned to Penn's Leonard Davis Institute and took a tenured position as Associate Professor of Economics at Villanova University, where he taught for 13 years before returning to Penn in 2004.

Eugene C. Nelson, D.Sc., M.P.H.
Dr. Eugene Nelson is Director of Quality Administration for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Professor, Healthcare Improvement Leadership Development within The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Dartmouth Medical School. He is a national leader in health care improvement and the development and application of measures of system performance, health outcomes, and customer satisfaction. In the early 1990s, Dr. Nelson and his colleagues at Dartmouth College began developing clinical microsystem thinking. Dr. Nelson's success in developing the "clinical value compass" and "instrument panels" to measure health care system performance have made him one of the premier quality and value measurement experts in the country. He is the recipient of the Joint Commission's Ernest A. Codman award for his work on outcomes measurement in health care. Dr. Nelson has been a pioneer in bringing modern quality improvement thinking into the mainstream of health care. He helped launch the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and served as a founding board member. He has authored more than 100 books, articles, and monographs. Two new books summarize recent work—Quality by Design: A Clinical Microsystems Approach (Jossey-Bass, 2007) and Practice-Based Learning and Improvement: A Clinical Improvement Action Guide (Joint Commission Resources, 2007).

Dr. Nelson received his AB degree in 1970 from Dartmouth College, his M.P.H. degree in 1973 from Yale School of Public Health, and his D.Sc. degree in 1977 from Harvard School of Public Health.

Evan M. Benjamin, M.D.
Evan M. Benjamin, M.D., is Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and Chief Quality Officer for Baystate Health in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Dr. Benjamin attended Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, and received his postgraduate education in Internal Medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Yale University School of Medicine. He received training in clinical epidemiology while working for the U.S. Public Health Service in New Mexico.

Dr. Benjamin directs the Division of Healthcare Quality at Baystate Medical Center where he oversees the operations and research goals of the division. His research interests are in safety and quality improvement with a particular interest in studying quality using large data sets. His division has won a number of national awards for advancing health care quality and patient safety. Dr. Benjamin speaks nationally regarding the impact of our health care delivery system on the quality of health care. He serves on a number of advisory panels, journal editorial boards and national committees and is published in both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed publications. He is on the board of Catholic Healthcare Partners, a 35 hospital non profit system based in Ohio where he chairs the board quality committee. His recent work appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine has helped to frame policy questions for improving our health care system.

Gabriel J. Escobar, M.D.
Gabriel J. Escobar, M.D., is a nationally recognized health services researcher and clinical epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research in Oakland, where he has been working since 1991. He directs the Perinatal Research Unit and the Systems Research Initiative at the Division of Research in Oakland. He received his M.D. degree in 1982 from the Yale University School of Medicine, completed his pediatrics residency at the University of California, San Francisco in 1985, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Stanford University from 1986 through 1989. His current research includes severity of illness measurement and risk adjustment in newborns and adults, prediction and quantification of hospital outcomes (particularly catastrophic ones) among newborns and adults, and the development of electronic scanning techniques to support outcomes research, quality improvement, and patient safety. Dr. Escobar also practices hospital-based pediatrics at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers in Walnut Creek, Antioch, and Oakland.

Gareth Parry, Ph.D.
Gareth joined the National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality (NICHQ) in 2008. He is currently working as an Improvement Advisor on the Improving the System of Care Collaborative. Previously, he was Director of Quality Measurement & Analysis in the Department of Medicine, Children's Hospital Boston and a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard School of Public Health. In the U.K., he was a Reader in Health Services Research at the University of Sheffield (UK), where he worked on the development, assessment, and application of risk-adjustment methods in neonatal, pediatric and adult intensive care and was a founding Director of the Pediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet).

Gerald T. O'Connor, Ph.D., ScD
Gerald T. O'Connor, Ph.D., Sc.D. received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University. He did his graduate training in epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health and completed postdoctoral studies in cardiovascular epidemiology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government. He has been a member of the Dartmouth Medical School faculty since 1987 and is currently Professor of Medicine and of Community and Family Medicine and Associate Dean for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He has authored over 150 scientific papers and book chapters. He has been Research Director of the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group and he been very active both regionally and nationally in the improvement of clinical care in cystic fibrosis.

Harlan Krumholz, M.D., S.M.
Dr. Krumholz is the Harold H. Hines, Jr., Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University School of Medicine, where he is Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program. He is also the Director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). Dr. Krumholz received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and an S.M. in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He trained in internal medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and in cardiology at Beth Israel in Boston.

Dr. Krumholz's research is focused on determining optimal clinical strategies and identifying opportunities for improvement in the prevention, treatment and outcome of patients with or at risk for cardiovascular disease. He leads initiatives through CMS to develop national mortality measures for public reporting of hospital performance. He also initiated and chairs the steering committee of D2B: An Alliance for Quality, an international campaign launched by the American College of Cardiology to implement key evidence-based strategies to achieve guideline recommended door-to-balloon times. He serves as Principal Investigator on two multicenter projects sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: the VIRGO study, an investigation of issues surrounding the care and outcomes of young women with acute myocardial infarction; and a study examining the effect of a telemonitoring strategy on the outcomes of patients with heart failure.

Harold Kilburn, Jr.
Harold Kilburn, Jr., is the Director of the Bureau of Biometrics and Health Statistics at the New York State (NYS) Department of Health. Mr. Kilburn has served with the Department for the past 20 years, including 18 years in the area of health care provider quality assessment. He was a senior member of the research team responsible for the New York State Cardiac Surgery Reporting System developed in the early 1990s. He is coauthor of numerous publications on health care quality measurement and is currently involved in the development of the NYS State Hospital Performance reporting system. Mr. Kilburn holds a master's degree in Organizational Sociology from the University at Albany.

Helen Burstin, M.D., M.P.H.
Helen Burstin, M.D., M.P.H. is the Senior Vice President for Performance Measures of The National Quality Forum, a private, not-for-profit membership organization established in 1999 to develop and implement a national strategy for health care quality measurement and reporting. Dr. Burstin joined NQF in January 2007 and is responsible for the NQF consensus development process and projects related to performance measures and practices.

Prior to joining NQF, Dr. Burstin was the Director of the Center for Primary Care, Prevention, and Clinical Partnerships at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). In her role, she oversaw the development of the Health Information Technology (IT) portfolio which invested over $166 million on research at the intersection of health IT and quality of care. Her center also supported the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and an extensive body of research on primary care and prevention. Prior to joining AHRQ in 2000, Dr. Burstin was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Quality Measurement at Brigham and Women's Hospital. In her role, she developed a hospitalwide electronic Quality Measurement Reporting System. She also served as the Chair of the Medical Staff Executive Committee on Quality Assurance and Risk Management.

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