Speakers and Research Mentors
Cynthia Baur, PhD is the Senior Advisor for Health Literacy, Office of the Associate Director for Communication, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). From 2006-2010, she was the Director, Division of Health Communication and Marketing, National Center for Health Marketing, CDC. She is a co-chair of the Healthy People 2020 Health Communication and Health Information Technology Workgroup and a co-chair of the HHS workgroup on health literacy. She is the lead author of the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy and one of the developers of CDC’s online health literacy training for health professionals. Dr. Baur holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Baur will be speaking at the Plenary Session on Monday October 18 at 4:00pm. She will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Cindy Brach is a Senior Health Policy Researcher at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). She conducts and oversees research on health literacy, cultural and linguistic competence, system design innovations, and Medicaid and SCHIP. Cindy leads AHRQ’s health literacy activities, coordinating AHRQ’s work in developing measures and improving the evidence base, and integrating health literacy activities throughout AHRQ’s portfolios and serves on the Department of Health and Human Services Health Literacy Work Group and the IOM Health Literacy Roundtable. Cindy is also AHRQ’s point person for cultural competence.
Cindy has initiated and overseen a number of health literacy projects, including the development of a Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit, CAHPS® Item Set for Addressing Health Literacy, and the AHRQ Informed Consent and Authorization Toolkit for Minimal Risk Research. Her publications include, “Integrating Health Literacy into Patient Safety Partnerships” (chapter in Partnering with Patients to Reduce Medical Errors), and “Integrating Literacy, Culture, and Language to Improve Quality of Health Care for Diverse Populations.” Cindy’s earlier experience includes serving as a mental health policy research director, a welfare reform consultant and provider of technical assistance, a state-level administrator, and a municipal policy analyst. Cindy received her Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also advanced to Ph.D. candidacy.
Ms. Brach will be moderating the Plenary Session on Monday October 18 at 10:00am. She will also be participating in the one-on-one program officer meetings at the conference.
Terry C. Davis, PhD is Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, LA (LSUHSC-S), where she also heads the Behavioral Science Unit of the Feist-Weiller Cancer Center. For the past 20 years, she has led an interdisciplinary team investigating the impact of patient literacy on health and healthcare. Seminal achievements include development of the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM), the most widely used literacy test in health care settings, and production of video tapes that have personalized the problem of low health literacy.
Dr. Davis chaired Louisiana’s statewide Health Literacy Task Force, the first legislatively mandated health literacy group in the nation. She received the Louisiana Public Health Association’s Founders Award for Significant Achievement in Public Health Research. She has served on the master faculty of the AMA’s Train-the-Trainer Health Literacy Curriculum, is a member of the Healthy People 2010 Health Literacy/Health Communication Section, and the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee.
Dr. Davis has published more than one hundred articles and book chapters related to health literacy, health communication, and preventive medicine. As director of the Doctor/Patient Communication course at LSUHSC and as a frequent speaker at national conferences, she has integrated her research findings into practical lessons for providers and health care administrators and policy makers. She is currently working with Dr. Mike Wolf at Northwestern, Dr. Ruth Parker at Emory and Dr. Will Shrank at Harvard on an AHRQ funded study to improve patient understanding and use of prescription medication labels.
Dr. Davis will be speaking on the Safety of Care Transitions Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am. She will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Darren DeWalt, MD, MPH is assistant professor in the division of general internal medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is board-certified in pediatrics and in internal medicine. Dr. DeWalt actively researches self-management interventions for patients with low-literacy and focuses on chronic diseases like diabetes, heart failure, COPD, and asthma. He was a member of the RTI-UNC Evidence-based Practice Center scientific team which performed a systematic review of the impact of literacy on health outcomes for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and wrote the chapter in the AMA Textbook on Health Literacy regarding the relationship between literacy and health outcomes.
Dr. DeWalt led the design team and is currently the director of evaluation for the Improving Performance in Practice (IPIP) program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. IPIP is a program to help practicing primary care physicians improve care systems through working in improvement networks, measuring and sharing performance data, and receiving improvement education and training.
Dr. DeWalt is the principal investigator at the UNC research site for the Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS). PROMIS is developing advanced tools for measurement of symptoms, function, and quality of life. Dr. DeWalt is interested in the use of self-report measurements among vulnerable populations, particularly those with low literacy.
Dr. DeWalt is a former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he also served as chief resident in internal medicine. He received his medical degree from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Dr. DeWalt will be speaking on the Self-Management Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm. He will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Kristine M. Gleason, RPh, is a Quality Leader within the Clinical Quality Management Department at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, IL. She has 19 years experience as a pharmacist and has worked in a variety of clinical settings in acute academic healthcare, as well as in patient and medication safety and clinical quality. Ms. Gleason has participated in many patient safety initiatives examining systems and errors, and has generated research, presentations and publications on patient safety and operational improvements. Most recently, through a grant supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Ms. Gleason helped lead a medication reconciliation research team, focusing on how healthcare providers obtain and communicate medication histories, and assessing if health literacy and other risk factors may lead to inaccurate medication histories and reconciliation failures. She was also instrumental in conducting an organizational risk assessment related to medication reconciliation and, based on these findings, helped to support the medication reconciliation design and implementation efforts at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. In addition to medication reconciliation, her other interests include care coordination, patient-provider communication, patient education, and translational research – moving research to practice – as it relates to improvements and sustainability in clinical quality, patient safety and public health initiatives.
Ms. Gleason will be speaking on the Safety of Care Transitions Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:000am.
Clement K. Gwede, PhD, MPH, RN is Assistant Member, Department of Health Outcomes and Behavior in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute. Dr. Gwede is also Associate Director of Diversity at Moffitt Cancer Center. In addition, Dr. Gwede is Assistant Professor of Oncologic Sciences, College of Medicine, University of South Florida. His primary area of research is health outcomes and behavior in cancer, with focus on understanding and reducing health disparities related to colorectal and prostate cancer using mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods and community-based participatory research (CBPR). An emerging area of Dr. Gwede’s intervention research is the development and use of theory-based, culturally targeted photo novellas to communicate and increase colorectal cancer screening (CRCS) among ethnic subgroups of Blacks and other medically underserved populations. Over the past two years, Dr. Gwede and colleagues have completed two pilot projects funded by the National Cancer Institute’s Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities (CRCHD) and produced two photo novellas, in English and Haitian Creole. These minimal intensity patient-centered interventions are partially fueled by culturally and literacy salient story lines and messages to increase uptake of CRCS.
Currently, Dr. Gwede is PI or Co-PI of two large scale randomized trials to test the efficacy of culturally targeted photo novella interventions under the Tampa Bay Community Cancer Network (TBCCN), a community-academic partnership fueled by CBPR collaborations. The first study, recently funded by NCI-CRCHD under the Community Networks Programs (CNP-II Centers/U54), involves multi-ethnic, medically underserved populations in federally qualified health centers and other community-based clinics. The second trial (recommended for funding) is a community-based randomized intervention addressing the burden of CRC among Blacks including African Americans and Caribbean-born Blacks. Dr. Gwede’s presentation will discuss the innovative application of CBPR, culture and health literacy concepts to address disparities in cancer screening among high-risk and medically underserved populations.
Dr. Gwede will be speaking on the Disparities Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm.
Elizabeth A. Hahn, MA is Associate Professor at Northwestern University. She is a medical sociologist and biostatistician with expertise in the design, implementation, coordination and statistical analysis of clinical trials, survey research studies, instrument development and validation projects, and other health services research studies. She has expertise in the application and interpretation of probabilistic measurement models (item response theory) as well as statistical models based on classical test theory. She participates in workshops and symposia to discuss research design, measurement and statistical analysis issues related to self-report data, and provides consultation to international researchers in the design and analysis of clinical trials. She is Associate Professor, Department of Medical Social Sciences, Department of Preventive Medicine, and Institute for Healthcare Studies, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. She is also Director of the Outcomes Measurement & Survey Core, a shared resource of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University (RHLCCC).
Her research is focused on health literacy and health disparities, and methodological issues in the measurement and analysis of patient-reported outcomes in patients with cancer and other chronic illnesses. She is the principal investigator on several grants targeted to underserved populations (AHRQ R01-HS10333 and R18-HS01730; ACS #TURSG-02-069-01-PBP; NHLBI R01-HL081485). She received the American Cancer Society Trish Greene Quality of Life Manuscript Award in 2005 and the International Society for Quality of Life Research (ISOQOL) Outstanding Article of the Year Award in 2008.
Ms. Hahn will be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
May G. Kennedy, PhD, MPH received her doctorate in community psychology from Georgia State University in 1982 and added an MPH from Emory in 1995. Until fall 2005, she was a Communication Analyst in the Division of Health Communication of the Office of Communication in the Office of the Director of CDC. Dr. Kennedy consulted on social marketing with CDC staff and national partners, helped evaluate CDC’s Entertainment Education program, and guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of Health Communication on what was learned about emergency communication from the bioterrorist anthrax attacks of 2001. Before joining the Office of the CDC Director, Dr. Kennedy was in the Division of HIV/AIDS prevention, where she was technical monitor and lead scientist for the Prevention Marketing Initiative Demonstration Project, an HIV prevention program for adolescents in five U.S. sites, and served for a year as the CDC representative to the White House Office on National HIV Policy.
Prior to coming to CDC, Dr. Kennedy had a policy “life.” After an APA Congressional Science Fellowship with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, she served for three years as professional staff with the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, where she dealt with health and social policy issues. Dr. Kennedy began her professional career as a member of the psychology faculty at Mercer University in Macon, GA where she designed, conducted and evaluated social skills-based preventive interventions for adolescents. She returned to academia in Fall 2005 as an associate professor at the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches Health Communication in the MPH program and does applied prevention communication research emphasizing Entertainment Education and social marketing.
Dr. Kennedy will be speaking on the Disparities Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm.
Ann King, MA is an Assessment Scientist in the Measurement Consulting Services unit at the National Board of Medical Examiners. Her current activities include teaching medical school faculty to develop better assessment tools; conducting research and development on the assessment instruments used in the clinical skills arena; and improving the understanding of clinical decision making. Previously, Ann was responsible for the test development unit that launched the United States Medical Licensing Exam, Step 2 Clinical Skills Exam in 2004. Ann has more than twenty-five years in the field of clinical skills assessment including 20 years at the NBME. She has mentored leaders in medical education at more than 100 medical schools in the United States and abroad. She has published and presented extensively on high stakes assessments using standardized patients. In 2004 Ann received the Outstanding Educator Award from the Association of Standardized Patients of which she is a founder.
Ms. King will be speaking on the Measurement Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Irwin S. Kirsch, PhD is the Director of the Center for Global Assessment at Educational Testing Service. He earned his Ph.D. in Educational Measurement, Reading/Literacy from the University of Delaware in 1982. Since joining ETS in 1984, he has directed a number of large-scale assessments in the area of literacy including the National Adult Literacy Survey, and the NAEP Young Adult Literacy Survey. He was also a key person in establishing the International Adult Literacy Surveys and has directed them for ETS since 1993. In 1987, he received the ETS Research Scientist Award for his work in the area of literacy and was named as an ETS Distinguished Presidential Appointee in 1999.
Dr. Kirsch currently manages several large-scale surveys including the Adult Education Program Study with the U.S. Department of Education and the Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Program with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Kirsch also chairs the Reading Expert Group for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and has been involved with several efforts aimed at defining and measuring information and communication technology (ICT) skills. In this area, he has directed an international panel for ETS that defined ICT literacy, has designed and conducted a feasibility study on ICT literacy for the OECD, and participates on an OECD advisory panel aimed at establishing a new survey of adult skills for the 21st century.
Dr. Kirsch will be speaking on the Measurement Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Nicole Lurie, MD, MSPH is Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health and Human Services at HHS. Prior to that, she was Senior Natural Scientist and the Paul O’ Neill Alcoa Professor of Health Policy at the RAND Corporation. There she directed RAND’s public health and preparedness work as well as RAND’s Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. She has previously served in federal government, as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health in the US Department of Health and Human Services; in state government, as Medical Advisor to the Commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Health; and in academia, as Professor in the University of Minnesota Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Lurie has a long history in the health services research field, primarily in the areas of access to and quality of care, managed care, mental health, prevention, public health infrastructure and preparedness and health disparities.
Dr. Lurie will be giving the keynote address on Monday October 18 at 9:00am.
Lauren McCormack, PhD, is the Senior Director of RTI’s Health Communication Program which includes 25 research staff. Her research focuses on promoting informed decision making through effective communication and measuring and evaluating the impact of health-related information on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. She has studied a variety of public health topics including cancer, diabetes, and developmental disabilities, and extensively examined health insurance decision making.
For nearly two decades, Dr. McCormack has led or participated in studies for AHRQ, CDC, NCI, FDA, CMS, and RWJF. As part of an NIH-R01, Dr. McCormack and her team developed a survey instrument to measure health literacy using a skills-based approach. Previously, she developed an instrument to measure health insurance literacy for the Medicare population and currently leads a study to develop measures of patient-centered communication for cancer care. She is also leading a study to refine and expand AHRQ’s electronic Preventive Services Selector tool which provides USPSTF guidelines to physicians in electronic format. For the Institute of Medicine, Dr. McCormack developed a communication initiative with the goals of fostering broader public understanding of evidence-based medicine and promoting greater clarity around patient roles and responsibilities.
Dr. McCormack has presented her findings at national conferences and published nearly 40 peer-reviewed articles in the following journals: the Journal of Health Communication, Health Services Research, Medical Care, Health Affairs, Medical Decision Making, The Patient– Patient-Centered Outcomes Research, the Journal of Cancer Education, the Journal of Consumer Affairs, and Health Education Research. She is an Associate Editor of the RTI Press and served as a guest editor of the 2010 special issue of the Journal of Health Communication that focused on health literacy.
She completed her training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Public Health.
Dr. McCormack will be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Cathy D. Meade, PhD, RN, FAAN is Senior Member in the Health Outcomes and Behavior Program at Moffitt Cancer Center, and Professor in the Department of Oncologic Sciences at the University of South Florida. Her research and education interests center on producing appropriate cancer communications, creating sustained community-based education and outreach initiatives for medically underserved populations, and developing cancer training programs to increase the number of underrepresented scientists. As background, she was one of first investigators to conduct studies in the area of patient understanding identifying the mismatch between patient’s reading levels and the reading level of health information. Practical aspects of this work have been published widely to help health professionals develop easy-to-understand educational tools and interventions. She was also a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Health Literacy Committee, which produced the 2004 report titled Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion. As a community-minded researcher, several funded projects exemplify her work that take into account culture, language and literacy for impacting health disparities, such as the NCI funded Tampa Bay Community Cancer Network, which addresses critical access, prevention and control issues among medically underserved, low-literacy and low-income populations. Other interests relate to exploring community members’ perceptions about the topic of biobanking; examining navigation models for outreach; and the application of transcreation procedures to adapt evidence-based interventions for new audiences. Dr. Meade also provides leadership for numerous funded education and training initiatives that address cancer, culture and literacy including marshaling the widely-recognized national biennial Cancer, Culture and Literacy conferences.
Dr. Meade will moderate the Health Disparities Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00 pm.
Helen I. Meissner, ScM, PhD is Senior Advisor, NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). She is responsible for public health and population science based initiatives. Since joining OBSSR in October 2007, Dr. Meissner has been leading scientific initiatives in health literacy http://obssr.od.nih.gov/scientific_areas/social_culture_factors_in_health/health_literacy/index.aspx and inequality and health http://obssr.od.nih.gov/scientific_areas/social_culture_factors_in_health/health_disparities/index.aspx#NICH. She also serves as program chair for the Annual NIH Conference on the Science of Dissemination and Implementation http://obssr.od.nih.gov/scientific_areas/translation/dissemination_and_implementation/index.aspx and has been instrumental in stimulating research in this area.
Prior to joining OBSSR, Dr. Meissner served as chief of the National Cancer Institute’s Applied Cancer Screening Research Branch where she provided scientific leadership in support of social, behavioral and communications research to promote the use of effective cancer screening tests, as well as strategies for informed decision-making regarding screening technologies, in both community and clinical practice. Dr. Meissner remains actively involved in cancer screening research and continues to serve as an associate editor for Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention.
Dr. Meissner received both her Sc.M. in Public Health Education and her Ph.D. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Meissner will be speaking at the Plenary Session on Monday October 18 at 4:00pm.
Dan Morrow, PhD is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with appointments in the Department of Educational Psychology and the Beckman Institute. He received a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of California Berkeley, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. After his post-doc, he was involved in research at Stanford University School of Medicine and NASA-Ames Research Center related to language comprehension in complex work situations such as communication between Air Traffic controllers and pilots. His NIH-funded work has focused on designing medication instructions and automated telephone messages for older adults. He is currently investigating effects of health literacy and cognition on comprehension of self-care information among older adults, and effects of computer-based support for patient/provider collaboration on medication knowledge and use. He is associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. In 2006 he was the Pfizer Visiting Professor in Health Communication at the University of North Carolina.
Dr. Morrow will be speaking at the Plenary Session on Monday October 18 at 4:00pm.
Professor Don Nutbeam, PhD, FFPH is currently Vice-Chancellor of the University of Southampton and a Professor of Public Health. His career has spanned positions in universities, government, health services and an independent research institute. From 2003-9 he was in senior academic roles in the University of Sydney, and prior to this he was Head of Public Health in the UK Department of Health. His research interests include public health intervention research in school, community and clinical settings, as well as studies of health literacy, and adolescent health behaviour. He has published widely on these topics. He has substantial international experience in both developing and developed countries, working as an advisor and consultant for the World Health Organisation over a 20 year period, and as consultant and team leader in projects for the World Bank.
Professor Nutbeam will be giving the keynote address on Tuesday October 19 at 8:00am.
Michael Paasche-Orlow, MD, MPH is Associate Professor at Boston University Medical Center and a nationally recognized expert in the field of health literacy. He was a guest editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine for a special issue on health literacy in 2006 and a guest editor for the journal Patient Education and Counseling for a special issue on health literacy in 2009. Dr. Paasche-Orlow is a co-investigator with seven funded grants that examine health literacy including two intervention studies that will evaluate simplified information technologies for behavior change among patients with a range of health literacy levels. Dr. Paasche-Orlow is currently serving on the national program committee for the 2010 Society for General Internal Medicine’s 33rd Annual meeting. Dr. Paasche-Orlow is the Associate Program Director for the Boston University School of Medicine General Internal Medicine Academic Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program and is currently the research mentor for 6 post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty members.
Dr. Paasche-Orlow will be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Ruth Parker, MD is Professor of Medicine at Emory University. She attended Davidson College and received her medical training at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She completed her residency and chief residency at the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, and her fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds Board Certification in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.
Dr. Parker is currently Professor of Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine. She is also Associate Director of the Faculty Development program in the Division of General Medicine, and holds a secondary appointment at the Emory University School of Public Health in the Division of Epidemiology. Dr. Parker’s primary research interests and activities have been in the area of medical education and health services of underserved populations. She has been actively involved in medical education and faculty development since joining the medical school faculty. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Parker has focused extensively on healthcare issues of underserved populations, particularly health literacy. She was a principal investigator in the Robert Wood Johnson Literacy in Health Study and helped create a widely used measurement tool to quantify patients’ ability to read and understand health information (TOFHLA, the test of functional health literacy in adults). She has authored numerous papers on health literacy, and co-edited the complete bibliography of medicine on health literacy for the National Library of Medicine. She co-authored the most widely used definition of health literacy, which was used in Healthy People 2010 and is currently used by the IOM and by the NIH. Dr. Parker currently serves as consultant and advisor to numerous federal agencies, professional societies, and members of industry on their initiatives related to health literacy.
Dr. Parker has received national recognition for her work. In 2001, she received the Silver Achievement Award for Women in Medicine, which honors women and men who have contributed substantially to women in academic medicine. In 2004, she received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal award from the American College of Physicians, given “…to that physician-scientist, clinician, or scientific group whose recent innovative work is making a notable contribution to improve clinical care in the field of internal medicine.” In 2005, she received the Walter C. Alvarez award from the American Medical Writers Association “…in recognition of someone known for his/her excellence in communication of health care developments and concepts to the public.
Dr. Parker will be moderating the oral abstract session on Monday at 11:00am. She will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Ellen Peters, PhD joined the faculty of the Psychology Department at The Ohio State University in 2010 as an Associate Professor after twelve years of being a research scientist at Decision Research. She has also worked extensively with the National Cancer Institute and the Food and Drug Administration to advance the science of human decision making as it applies to health and health policy.
Dr. Peters conducts basic and applied research in judgment and decision making. She focuses on how affective, intuitive, and deliberative processes help people to make decisions in an increasingly complex world. She studies decision making as an interaction of characteristics of the decision situation and characteristics of the individual, including health numeracy and health literacy.
She has three major strands of research. First, her research interests in decision making include number processing and the study of individual differences in numeracy and an intuitive sense of numbers. In recent publications, Dr. Peters and colleagues have focused on the roles of health numeracy and intuitive number sense with respect to how individuals process and use numeric and non-numeric sources of information in decisions. A second central strand of research concerns how affect and emotion influence information processing and decisions. Affect appears to have multiple functions in judgment and decision processes (as information, as a common currency, as a spotlight on information, and as a direct motivator of behaviors). Third, she is interested in how information processing and decision making change in complex ways across the adult life span. She is also generally interested in issues of risk perception and risk communication in health, financial, and environmental contexts, including how to present information to facilitate its comprehension and use.
Dr. Peters will be speaking at the Plenary Session on Monday October 18 at 4:00pm.
Susan M. Pisano is the Vice President of Communications for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) is a national association whose member companies provide health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans. Our member companies offer medical insurance, long-term care insurance, disability income insurance, dental insurance, supplemental insurance, stop-loss insurance and reinsurance to consumers, employers and public purchasers.
As Vice President for Communications, Susan acts as a spokesperson for AHIP and is responsible for outreach to member companies, the news media, and other major audiences. She is the primary staffer for AHIP’s Health Literacy Task Force.
Ms. Pisano has worked at AHIP since 1987. Before coming to AHIP she was the public relations director at Pacific Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, a local insitution that had an HMO affiliated with it since1985. Susan began her career at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, where she attended Chestnut Hill College (B.A., 1971), and Villanova University (M.A., 1975).
Ms. Pisano will be speaking in the Measurement Panel on Tuesday October 18 at 9:00am.
Scott C. Ratzan, Editor-In-Chief, MD, MPA is Vice President, Government Affairs, Europe for Johnson & Johnson. He also is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives and holds faculty appointments at Yale University School of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine, George Washington University, the College of Europe (Belgium) and the University of Cambridge.He has been involved in a variety of global and domestic initiatives including his recent work at the U.S. Agency for International Development where he led the design for strategic health communication implementation for over 65 countries. From 1990-1998 he was co-founder and Director of the Emerson/Tufts Program in Health Communication, a joint master’s degree program between Emerson College and Tufts University School of Medicine.
Dr. Ratzan recently was principal author of Attaining Global Health: Challenges and Opportunities, 2000, as well as the Mad Cow Crisis: Health and the Public Good, 1998 and AIDS: Effective Health Communication for the 90s, 1993. He has consulted with a variety of organizations including World Health Organization, Institute of Medicine and a number of U.S. Governmental agencies.
Dr. Ratzan recently published “One Mad Cow Sets Off a Stampede” in the New York Times on December 30, 2003.
(Education: M.D., University of Southern California; M.P.A., John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; M.A., Emerson College; A.B., Occidental College)
Russell Rothman, MD is an Associate Professor in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Rothman currently serves as the Director of the Vanderbilt Program on Effective Health Communication, and Chief of the Vanderbilt Med/Peds Section. Dr. Rothman is also the Co-Director of the Community Engaged Research Core of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, and the Deputy Director of the Prevention and Control Division of the Vanderbilt Diabetes Research and Training Center. Additionally, Dr. Rothman is an Associate Director of the Nashville VA Quality Scholars Fellowship Program.
Dr. Rothman received his bachelor’s degree in Zoology and Political Science from Duke University in 1992. He received his MD from Duke in 1996. During this time he also completed a master’s in Public Policy (M.P.P) at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke. After this, Dr. Rothman remained at Duke where he completed a combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency in 2000. From 2000 to 2002, he served as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In 2002, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics. Dr. Rothman’s current research focuses on health communication/health literacy, and improving care for adult and pediatric patients with diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases. He has been funded by the NIH, American Diabetes Association, the Pfizer Clear Health Communication Initiative, and other sources to examine the role of literacy and numeracy. He is currently the Principal Investigator on an NIH multisite randomized study addressing literacy and health communication in pediatric obesity prevention, and another cluster randomized study addressing health communication to improve adult diabetes care in health department safety net clinics. Dr. Rothman has served as a reviewer on the NIH Special Emphasis Panel on Health Literacy and the Pfizer Health Literacy Fellowship Awards. Dr. Rothman has been a Pfizer Visiting Professor in Health Literacy at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Rothman currently serves as an Associate Editor for Clinical Diabetes, a journal of the American Diabetes Association.
Dr. Rothman will be speaking on the Self-Management Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm. He will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Debra Roter, PhD is Professor of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and holds appointments of Professor in the Schools of Medicine and Nursing and with the Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Roter’s primary research focus is in the study of patient-health care provider communication. She is the author of the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS), a method of process analysis applied to medical exchange widely used by researchers and educators nationally and internationally. Her studies include basic social psychology research regarding social and psychological determinants and consequences of interpersonal influence within medical encounters, patient and provider interventions to improve health care quality, and communication and educational applications to enhance patient and provider communication skills.
Dr. Roter has authored over 200 articles and book chapters and three books related to the subject of patient-health care provider communication. She is recognized by the Web of Science as among highly cited authors in the social sciences.
Dr. Roter is currently Principal Investigator of an NICHD funded study to assess oral literacy burden of medical communication and to develop an ameliorative patient activation intervention for pregnant women with poor literacy skills.
Dr. Roter will be speaking on the Measurement Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Rima Rudd, ScD is Senior Lecturer on Society, Human Development, and Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her work centers on health communication and the design and evaluation of public health programs. She teaches courses on innovative strategies in health education, program planning and evaluation, and health literacy.
Dr. Rudd is widely recognized as a leader in health literacy – helping to shape both the research and practice agenda in the US, Canada, and Europe. Dr. Rudd works closely with the adult education, public health oral health and medical sectors. Her current research looks at literacy-related disparities and literacy-related barriers to health programs, services, and care.
Dr. Rudd will be moderating the Measurement Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. She graduated from Stanford University with honors in biological sciences and humanities. She attended UC San Diego School of Medicine and completed a masters’ of public health in epidemiology from UC Berkeley. She completed her residency in internal medicine and her research fellowship in general internal medicine at UCSF. Dr. Sarkar’s research focuses on the ambulatory patient safety, especially for vulnerable chronic disease populations. Her interests include the role of communication in safety as well as health information technology interventions. She holds a career development award, attends on the medical wards, and continues the primary care clinic at San Francisco General Hospital she has had since her internship.
Dr. Sarkar will be speaking on the Safety of Care Transitions Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Dean Schillinger, MD is Professor of Medicine in Residence at the University of California San Francisco, and Interim Chief of the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). He is also a practicing primary care physician at SFGH, an urban public hospital, where he sees patients, teaches in the primary care residency program, and conducts research. He is the Director of the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, a new research center committed to transforming clinical and public health practice by improving health communication for socially vulnerable people, and is a member of a UCSF-wide translational research committee to expand the scope and quality of implementation and dissemination sciences.
Dr. Schillinger also serves as Chief of the Diabetes Prevention and Control Program for the California Department of Public Health, where he has been expanding the program’s work in health communications, social and environmental determinants of diabetes, and health disparities. In his prior administrative roles, he has directed the Medi-Cal managed care clinic at SFGH, the ambulatory care clinics at SFGH, and has been the Director of Clinical Operations for the Department of Medicine.
Author of over 100 scientific manuscripts, Dr. Schillinger carries out research related to healthcare for vulnerable populations, and focuses on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management. He has carried out a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on the care of patients with diabetes and heart disease. He has been honored with the 2003 Institute for Healthcare Advancement Research Award; the 2008 Research Award in Safety and Quality from the National Patient Safety Foundation; the 2009 Engel Award in Health Communication Research; and the California Association of Public Hospital Quality Leaders Award for this work. He has been the recipient of grants from NIH, The California Endowment, The Commonwealth Fund, AHRQ, and the California Health Care Foundation to develop and evaluate care management programs tailored to the literacy and language needs of patients with chronic disease, and was a co-investigator for the National Association of Public Health and Hospital Institute’s Diabetes Quality Improvement Consortium.
Dr. Schillinger contributed to the 2004 Institute of Medicine Report on Health Literacy, is a section editor for the textbooks Understanding Health Literacy (AMA press) and Caring for Vulnerable and Underserved Populations (Lange series, 2007), and is a member of the American College of Physician’s Health Communication Advisory Board, and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Patient Education and Counseling. He completed an Open Society Institute Advocacy Fellowship working with California Literacy, Inc., a non-profit educational organization that helps people gain literacy skills, to advance the California Health Literacy Initiative. With respect to chronic disease control on the global level, he recently returned from a semester as Visiting Scholar at the University of Chile’s School of Public Health to help develop chronic disease prevention and treatment initiatives, has served as a consultant to the National Health Group in Singapore and the Scotland Department of Health on chronic disease and health promotion initiatives.
Dr. Schillinger will be moderating the Self-Management Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm. He will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Joanne Schwartzberg, MD is the Director, Aging and Community Health at the American Medical Association. She has over 30 years of experience in geriatrics and long-term care. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. Dr. Schwartzberg is a past-president of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, the Illinois Geriatrics Society, and the American Academy of Home Care Physicians. In 2005, Dr. Schwartzberg was appointed by President Bush to the Advisory Committee for the 2005 White House Conference on Aging. Dr. Schwartzberg is director of Aging and Community Health at the American Medical Association (AMA). She received her BA from Harvard University and her MD from Northwestern University. She currently directs AMA initiative on aging and long term care with projects on medical education and geriatric competencies, older driver safety, medical management of the home care patient, health literacy, safe communication, and patient self management.
Dr. Schwartzberg has been working in the field of health literacy and clinician-patient communication since 1997. She organized the AMA ad hoc committee of experts that developed Health Literacy: Report of the Council on Scientific Affairs, organized physician awareness campaigns based on the AMA’s Health Literacy Introductory Kit, and later developed the Health Literacy: Help Your Patients Understand self-study educational program. She has led the AMA Foundation’s Health Literacy Training of Trainers program for the last 6 years, which with 29 teams around the country has reached over 30,000 health professionals. In 2005, Dr. Schwartzberg was an editor of the first textbook in the field: Understanding Health Literacy: Implications for Medicine and Public Health. She has recently been working on patient safety and health literacy, leading to the 2007 monograph and current CME program on Reducing the risk by designing a safer, shame-free health care environment.
Dr. Schwartzberg is the 2001 recipient of the Henry P. Russe, MD, Citation for Exemplary Compassion in Healthcare awarded by the Institute of Medicine of Chicago and the Rush-Presbyterian-St Luke’s Medical Center.
Dr. Schwartzberg will be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.
Susan J. Shaw, PhD is a medical anthropologist specializing in ethnicity, health disparities, and access to health care in the United States. She is Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a member of the Cancer Health Disparities Institute at the Arizona Cancer Center. Dr. Shaw is currently principal investigator on the Culture and Health Literacy project, a four-year, NCI-funded study of cultural differences, health literacy, and chronic disease management among four ethnic groups in the northeastern U.S. Findings have been published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health and presented at conferences of the American Public Health Association and the American Association of Cancer Researchers, among others. Other publications include qualitative analyses of ethnic and cultural difference in culturally appropriate health care programs for primary care providers.
Dr. Shaw will be speaking on the Self-Management Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm.
Armando Valdez, PhD is a behavioral scientist specializing in the development and evaluation of health communication interventions, principally in the area of prevention. Dr. Valdez earned his doctorate in Communication Research at Stanford University (1978). He taught at several California universities for ten years and subsequently managed a multidisciplinary research center at Stanford University through the 1980s. As an academic, his research interests focused on the impact of emerging telecommunications technology on society.
In 1990, Dr. Valdez left academia to establish a research institute focused on exploring health communication models for reaching medically underserved communities. His unique niche is the use of health information technology to deliver behavioral-based health promotion interventions that empower patients to make informed decisions and adopt healthy behaviors.
In 1996, Dr. Valdez began exploring the use of health information technology for patient education. In 1999, he developed a line of ‘first-generation’ touchscreen kiosks for a breast cancer education intervention funded by the National Cancer Institute. These kiosks leveraged interactive, multimedia touchscreen technology into a user-friendly device that overcomes cognitive, linguistic and cultural barriers for low-literacy patients. An efficacy study revealed that a kiosk-delivered education intervention dramatically increased mammography screening among the target population. This seminal intervention received special recognition from the American Public Health Association, earned the prestigious Tibbetts Award, and won the 2004 Research Award from the eHealth Developers’ Summit.
This research was followed by a cervical cancer education intervention that used next-generation digital kiosks to deliver a screening and risk reduction intervention to medically underserved Latinas. An efficacy study of the intervention found significant knowledge gains, improved attitudes, increased self-efficacy and significant screening behavior. This research received an award from the APHA Women’s Caucus in 2006.
Dr. Valdez is currently completing an efficacy evaluation of a colorectal cancer education intervention delivered through digital video touchscreen kiosks. This study accrued a sample of 700 medically underserved, unscreened Latino men and women. Data analyses are currently underway. The efficacy study is scheduled for completion later this year.
Last year, Dr. Valdez conducted a pilot study to assess the feasibility of developing a multilingual, multicultural education intervention targeting populations at high risk for HPV infection and progression to precancerous cervical lesions. The target audiences for this education intervention are U.S. Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Filipinos, Latinos, and African Americans. The long-term goal of the study is to educate and empower parents and adolescents to make an informed HPV vaccination decision. He will discuss the findings of this study today.
Dr. Valdez will be speaking on the Disparities Panel on Monday October 18 at 2:00pm.
Mark V. Williams, MD, FACP, FHM is Professor of Medicine and Chief, Division of Hospital Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Since the early 1990’s, Dr. Williams has written and co-authored publications related to health literacy and its impact on patient understanding and health outcomes. He served as a Co-Principal Investigator on the Robert Wood Johnson Literacy in Health Study along with Drs. David Baker and Ruth Parker. Dr. Williams also served as a member of the National Work Group on Cancer and Literacy and as Assistant Chair of the AMA Ad Hoc Committee on Health Literacy. A Past-President of the Society of Hospital Medicine, he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. His most recent research endeavors have focused on quality improvement, teamwork, and time motion studies within hospitals and during the discharge process.
Dr. Williams will be moderating the Safety of Care Trannsitions Panel on Tuesday October 19 at 9:00am.
Michael S. Wolf, PhD MPH, MA is Associate Professor of Medicine, Associate Division Chief of Research, and Director of the Center for Communication in Healthcare at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Dr. Wolf is a behavioral scientist and health services researcher with primary interests in adult literacy and learning, cognitive factors, and the management of chronic disease. He was one of the first recipients of the Pfizer Health Literacy Initiative Scholar Award and has received numerous national awards for his work in the field of health literacy and medication safety.
Dr. Wolf has written 84 peer-reviewed publications, many of which address the problem of limited health literacy. He currently serves on advisory committees for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Pharmacopeia, the American Dental Association, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He has repeatedly provided consultation to the Institute of Medicine, American College of Physicians Foundation, American Medical Association, American Pharmacists Association, and Centers for Disease Control on health literacy matters.
He is the principal investigator on grants from the National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Target Corporation, Foundation for Informed Decision Making, and the Missouri Foundation for Health. Dr. Wolf also led an Institute of Medicine white paper on health literacy and medication safety, and he is the principal investigator of a trial to test enhanced drug labeling and the use of visual aids to improve patient processing and understanding of medication instructions.
Dr. Wolf will be moderating an oral abstract session TBD. He will also be participating in one-on-one mentoring sessions during the conference.