Investing in Equity and Collaboration

Speaker Biographies

(Printable pdf of conference speaker bios may be downloaded here.)

Melinda K. Abrams is Executive Vice President for Programs at the Commonwealth Fund, where she has responsibility for the development and management of the Fund’s grant programs. Since joining the Fund in 1997, Ms. Abrams has worked on the Fund’s Task Force on Academic Health Centers, the Child Development and Preventive Care program, led the Patient-Centered Coordinated Care Program, and most recently was the senior vice president of the Delivery System Reform and International Health Policy programs. Ms. Abrams has served on many national committees and boards for private organizations and federal agencies and is a peer-reviewer for several journals. Ms. Abrams was the recipient of a Champion Award from the Primary Care Development Corporation and a Primary Care Community/Research Leadership Award from the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative. Ms. Abrams holds a B.A. in history from Cornell University and an M.S. in Health Policy and Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Lori Andrade is the Chief Operations Officer for Health and Welfare Council of Long Island. With 20 years of experience in Long Island’s non-profit sector, Lori has worked with Long Island’s leading regional non-profit organizations creating systemic social change. Since 2010, Lori has been the Chief Operations Office of the Health and Welfare Council of Long Island (HWCLI). Lori oversees critical organizational advocacy and programming, contributes to strategic planning, manages funder relationships and grant writing. Lori directed and convened HWCLI’s Health Equity Alliance of Long Island (HEALI), a coalition of 100 human service agencies developed out of the DSRIP CBO Planning Grant to create a regional, integrated, and holistic human service system for Long Island that is person centric, and equity focused. Under Lori’s leadership, HEALI has established a governance structure, mission, vision, and goals while completing a coalition wide technology assessment, a pilot using referral technology and incorporated lessons learned from DSRIP and COVID to advocate for the new 1115 waiver program. Prior to HWCLI, Lori was the Director of Development and Communications at Sustainable Long Island and a consultant on the Rauch Foundation’s Long Island Index. She has also worked with ERASE Racism, Planned Parenthood of NYC, and a Continuing Medical Education (CME) company conducting needs assessments and outcomes evaluations for educational programs. Lori has a B.S. in Healthcare and Welfare Policy Analysis from Cornell University and an M.S.A. in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, from Central Michigan University.

Emily Arsen (she/her) is a Senior Health Policy Analyst in the Medicaid Institute at United Hospital Fund. She produces data analyses, writes policy memos, and facilitates convenings that support the improvement of the New York State Medicaid program. Before joining UHF in 2019, Emily worked on system process improvement at Mount Sinai Health System, and provided technical assistance and program evaluation on grants for federal agencies including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of Minority Health. She holds an M.P.H. from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a B.A. from Barnard College.

Amir Bassiri is the Acting Medicaid Director for the New York State Department of Health (DOH). He joined the Department of Health in 2019 as Chief of Staff to the Medicaid Director and recently served as the Deputy Medicaid Director, overseeing the operation and performance of nine Medicaid Divisions. Collectively, these nine Divisions are comprised of more than 750 State staff, over 500 contracted staff and management of over 300 contracts, including some of the State's largest technology, actuarial and financial audit contracts, along with health plans. Prior to his work with the Department, he worked as a senior policy advisor for health in the Governor's Office under the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services. He earned his B.A. in both Economics and Psychology from the University of California, Davis, before earning a Master’s in Social Work (M.S.W) from Columbia University.

Giovanna Braganza (she/her) is a Research Analyst at the United Hospital Fund. Giovanna analyzes public data and Medicaid claims data to inform health policy recommendations guiding New York State Medicaid programs. Prior to joining UHF in 2022, Giovanna provided patient education and assessments to explore systemic health disparities in genomic medicine at the Mount Sinai Institute for Genomic Health. She earned a Master of Public Health from the SUNY Downstate School of Public Health and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Rochester.

Ann Marie Cook is President and CEO for Lifespan of Greater Rochester. Before her current position, she was the Chief Operating Officer at Lifespan. She has been at Lifespan for over 26 years. Ann Marie is the chair of the Monroe County Council for Elders and serves as co-chair of the New York State Coalition on Elder Abuse. She serves on the Monroe County Systems Integration committee which is working to connect human services, health care and education to better meet the needs of people in our community. She currently serves on the boards of Council of Agency Executives, Highland Hospital Board, Live On NY (NYC), Regional Health Information Organization, UR Home Care, and Al Sigl Community of Agencies. She also serves on Senator Gillibrand’s Working Group on the Aging and is part of a consortium of agencies working on a Livable Communities designation for our region.

Ann Marie is the former Chair of the New York State Coalition on Aging. She was a delegate to the 2005 White House Conference on Aging. In 2019, she won the Leadership Award from the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle Top Workplace Award. In 2018, she was an Athena Award nominee. She was the recipient of the 2018 Edward Mott Moore award from the Monroe County Medical Society and the Member of Distinction award from the Council of Agency Executives. In 2012, she received the State Society on Aging’s Presidents Award for providing leadership in the field of aging. Ann Marie holds an M.P.A. from SUNY Brockport.

Jeffrey D. Coots serves as the Director of the From Punishment to Public Health (P2PH) initiative based at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In this role, Jeff pursues P2PH’s mission to accelerate reforms at the intersections of public health and public safety, with a focus on upstream interventions that reduce criminal legal system exposure and increase access to appropriate care and services. Jeff facilitates several working groups of municipal and community-based partners in pursuit of agency-level policy adaptations that lead to improved outcomes for clients and increased efficiency and efficacy for frontline and managerial staff. He also oversees P2PH’s research and evaluation efforts that link faculty and students from John Jay College with key community partners delivering and overseeing direct services to justice-involved populations. Prior to joining P2PH, Jeff completed a joint Juris Doctor/Master of Public Health degree program at Northeastern University School of Law and Tufts University School of Medicine, where he focused his studies on the social justice and health impacts of mass incarceration. 

While in Boston, he served as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow and delivered dialogue-based “Healthy Reentry” workshops to introduce strategies for working in collaboration with a primary care provider to prevent new infections and mitigate the effects of chronic disease. He started his professional career as a Development Officer at Goodwill of Greater Washington, steadily increasing funding to support workforce development programs and wrap-around services available to those returning from jail and prison. He earned his B.A. in Government International Relations from Dartmouth College in 2004.

Lori Frank is Senior Vice President for Research, Policy, and Programs at NYAM. Her work focuses on methods for incorporating patient and consumer perspectives in health outcomes research and healthcare valuation. She is Past President of the International Society for Quality of Life Research, a professional society devoted to health outcomes assessment, and she serves on the Board of the Personalized Medicine Coalition and on the Medical, Scientific, and Memory Screening Advisory Board of the Alzheimer's Foundation of America.

Previously, Lori was a Senior Scientist with the RAND Corporation. She completed the Health and Aging Policy Fellowship through the Congressional Fellowship Program. She founded and served as Program Director of the Evaluation and Analysis Program at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), establishing a research program to examine stakeholder engagement. She served as Executive Director and Senior Research Leader, Center for Health Outcomes Research, with MEDTAP International/United BioSource Corporation, where she led the scientific and financial performance of the Center. She founded and served as Principal Investigator of the Cognition Initiative with the Critical Path Institute Patient-Reported Outcome Consortium, a multi-sponsor patient-reported outcome measure development program focused on dementia. 
Her research began with clinical policy work for the Sheppard Pratt Psychiatric Hospital. She has held research and teaching positions with Georgetown University Department of Psychiatry, the National Institute on Aging, Medimmune LLC/AstraZeneca, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Her PhD is in Human Development/Gerontology from the Pennsylvania State University and her M.A. is in Biopsychology from the Johns Hopkins University.

Tracie M. Gardner serves as Legal Action Center Senior Vice President of Policy Advocacy, where she spearheads major initiatives and fosters strategic partnerships that support LAC’s mission. Tracie has worked almost 30 years in the health and social services policy arena as a policy advocate, trainer and lobbyist. 

From 2015-2017, Tracie served as the Assistant Secretary of Health for New York State, where she oversaw the state’s addiction, mental health and developmental disabilities agencies. Tracie received a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.

Laura Gustin is Executive Director of the Monroe County Systems Integration Project, a multi-year initiative tasked with creating a transformed, person-centered system of service delivery that connects the health, human service, education, and public sectors in Monroe County, New York. In this role, Laura facilitates consensus among community members, institutional leaders and decision-makers as they develop project strategy and redesign service delivery, at scale. Both methodical and strategic, Laura is a system entrepreneur, driven to fundamentally alter the systems that create our most vexing social problems.

Over the last five years, Laura has provided skilled planning, facilitation, coordination, and support to achieve all aspects of the Systems Integration Project’s planning, design, development and implementation phases. Laura brings a deep experience in health systems improvement and collective impact, including the design and implementation of innovative solutions in support of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, local implementation of New York State’s Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program, and Federally Qualified Health Center transformation. Laura holds a M.P.H. from the University of South Florida and B.A. from the State University of New York at Geneseo.

For nearly 15 years, Chris Joseph (he/him) has been dedicated to addressing socioeconomic and racial health disparities among marginalized NYC communities. Chris joined the EngageWell IPA in January 2019 overseeing program innovation, clinical integration, and quality management initiatives and assumed the Executive Director role in July 2021. Prior to EngageWell, Chris oversaw NYC's largest HIV Care Coordination Program at Mount Sinai’s Institute for Advanced Medicine and managed an SDOH intervention at Woodhull Medical Center where undergraduate Health Advocates connected low-income, pediatric families living in Brooklyn to community resources and public benefits. Since 2011, Chris has participated in NYC’s Ryan White HIV Planning Council & Integration of Care Committee helping improve NYC's safety-net system for people with or at risk for HIV. Chris was also an Adjunct Instructor for four years at LaGuardia Community College where he taught Population Health for the Community Health Worker Certificate Program. In 2015, Chris’s health equity work earned him an Emerging Social Work Leadership Award from the National Association of Social Workers NYC Chapter. Chris grew up in east Detroit, Michigan, earning M.P.H and M.S.W. degrees from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (Go Blue!).

Rochester native Wade Norwood has held leadership positions in the community for more than three decades, including roles in public service, education, and health care. Since 2006, Wade has led Common Ground Health and has been central to pushing the organization to become a more effective change agent for all Finger Lakes region residents, especially those most at risk. He spearheaded the organization’s efforts to engage underserved populations in health improvement, championing the creation of the African American Health Coalition, the Latino Health Coalition and the Partnership for Access to Healthcare, and providing ongoing support for these and other engagement initiatives.

From 1990 to 2005, Wade served as a Rochester City Council member and chair of the council’s Committee on Housing and Community Development. His leadership roles at the state and local levels include co-chairing the New York State Health Department’s workgroup on health care workforce and co-chairing with Congressman Joseph Morelle the region’s Systems Integration initiative, a cross-sector effort to integrate services and data for families affected by poverty. As a member of the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Commission, Norwood helps to guide funding for economic-development, job-development and anti-poverty efforts across the region. Wade serves on the board of the national Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement, which works to transform healthcare delivery, payment, and information systems. He is also president and senior pastor at the Holy Jerusalem Spiritual Church. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Rochester.

Dr. Shira Shavit is a Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco and the Executive Director of the Transitions Clinic Network. For over a decade, Shira has been redefining national best practices for the care for chronically-ill individuals and communities impacted by incarceration. Shira also directs and sees patients in the Transitions Clinic program in San Francisco's and the Medical Discharge Planning clinic at San Quentin State Prison. In addition to providing clinical care to returning prisoners, Shira has provided technical assistance to many counties and states to improve health outcomes, cut health care costs, and support healthy integration of individuals returning home from incarceration.  She also worked as a consultant to reform healthcare systems in the California State prisons in collaboration with the Federal Receivership (2006-2011). She is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leader Award (2010). Shira graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, completed her MD at Rush University in Chicago, and completed her residency training at the University of California, San Francisco. She is currently a CHCF Health Care Leadership Fellow.

Chad Shearer (he/him) oversees UHF’s work across the coverage and access, quality and efficiency, and clinical-community partnerships focus areas, as well as UHF conferences and grantmaking. Prior to joining UHF in 2014, Chad was at the Princeton School of Public & International Affairs, where he was deputy director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Health Reform Assistance Network, a project coordinating technical assistance to 11 states on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion provisions. He was also a lecturer in public affairs at Princeton, teaching a capstone policy workshop. Chad has served as a senior program officer at the Center for Health Care Strategies, where he helped shape its Medicaid Leadership Institute, an intensive training program for selected state Medicaid directors. He was served as the legislative director for Congressman Pete Stark, Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health in the U.S. House of Representatives. Chad holds both a law degree and an M.P.A. from the University of Iowa.

Anthony Shih (he/him) is president of United Hospital Fund. He is nationally recognized for his expertise in health policy, health system performance improvement, quality improvement, and population health, and for his commitment to improving quality and reducing inequities in care for vulnerable populations. Tony served, from 2014 through July 2017, as executive vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine, which works to improve health and well-being in cities worldwide, using a population health approach. Previously, he was executive vice president for programs at The Commonwealth Fund, overseeing all program and research activities, including initiatives related to coverage and access, delivery system transformation, payment reform, and health system performance scorecards.

Earlier, Tony was chief quality officer and vice president for strategy at IPRO, where he developed and managed large-scale quality assessment and improvement projects related to Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and led IPRO’s Health Care Transparency Group. He began his medical career at a community-based mental health clinic in Oakland, CA, serving immigrant and refugee families.

A New York City native, Tony graduated from Amherst College with a degree in economics. He earned his M.D. at the NYU School of Medicine and his master’s at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and is Board-certified in preventive medicine and public health. He lives in Forest Hills with his wife, Yvonne Tsang, and twins Nathan and Allison.

As Executive Director, Carol Tegas leads the strategic direction of Finger Lakes Performing Provider System (FLPPS) and its wholly owned subsidiary Greater Rochester Health Home Network (GRHHN). Carol has been responsible for relationship and trust-building across a diverse set of providers and provider networks in the 13-county region, mobilizing partners and the FLPPS team toward successful achievement of a common goal: system transformation in pursuit of the Triple Aim. She led the implementation of the NYS Department of Health Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program in the Finger Lakes region and has strategically positioned the organizations for continued healthcare redesign efforts focusing on community and clinical integration, addressing social determinants of health, health equity, and associated workforce initiatives.

Carol has over 30 years' experience in strategic planning, integrated provider association (IPA) management, financial management, contract negotiations, pay‐for‐performance models, investments, financial reporting, communications, operations, and new business modeling. Before joining FLPPS as Executive Director of Rochester Community IPA (RCIPA), Carol partnered with Gerald Archibald of The Bonadio Group, on developing strategy to design and promote a management services organization model to support newly forming IPAs and provider networks across NYS.

Carol provides her expertise and guidance on various regional collaborative committees, including the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative Steering Committee, FLPPS/Common Ground Health Workforce Consortium, Rochester Institute of Technology Health System Administration Board, and Northstar Network’s Healthcare Business Academy Board of Advisors. She enjoys time with her husband, two adult children, two dogs, and large extended family.

Since June 2015, Patsy Yang has served as Senior Vice President for NYC Health + Hospitals, Correctional Health Services, which provides medical, mental health, nursing, social work, substance use, dental health, and reentry support services to individuals in the City’s custody. Patsy previously served as Director of Health Policy in the NYC Mayor’s Office.

Prior to working in the Mayor’s Office, she was Executive Deputy Commissioner and Chief Operating Officer for the NYC Department of Health and Acting Commissioner of Health for Westchester County, New York. Earlier service with NYC Health + Hospitals included Associate Executive Director at Bellevue Hospital Center and at Metropolitan Hospital Center.

Patsy is a native New Yorker and holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.P.H. and a Doctor of Public Health with Distinction from Columbia University.

Printable pdf of speaker bios may be downloaded here.

Acknowledgments

This conference was supported by funding from The Commonwealth Fund, NYAM, UniteUs, Amida Care, and Manatt Health. All speakers, moderators, and panelists were generous with their time and insights. This conference benefited from the expertise of Lori Andrade (Health and Welfare Council of Long Island), Amir Bassiri (New York State Department of Health), Ann Marie Cook (Lifespan), Jeffery Coots (John Jay College), Tracie Gardner (Legal Action Center), Laura Gustin (Systems Integration Project), Chris Joseph (EngageWell IPA), Tina Latimer (Common Ground Health), Sidney Lin (University of California – San Francisco), Kathryn Quigley (New York State Department of Health), Shavon Reid Smith (NYC Health + Hospitals), Lauri Scott (Finger Lakes Performing Provider System), Crystal Seward (Legal Action Center), Dr. Shira Shavit (Transitions Clinic Network and University of California- San Francisco), Carol Tegas (Finger Lakes Performing Provider System), Wade Norwood (Common Ground Health), and Dr. Patsy Yang (NYC Health + Hospitals).

UHF staff contributed to the success of the conference, including James Andrews, Catherine Arnst, Emily Arsen, Giovanna Braganza, Alex Brandes, Hillary Brown, Alice Ehrlich, Adam Fifield, Miles P. Finley, Gabby Groenke, Hollis Holmes, Kevin Mallon, Peter Newell, Joey Rodriguez, Sally Rogers, Chad Shearer, and Dr. Anthony Shih.