ZETEMA PROJECT - Key Persons
Bob Kocher, MD is a Partner at Venrock and focuses on healthcare IT and services investments. He currently serves on the Board of Jiff, Aledade, and Lyra Health, where he is also a co-founder, and is a Board Observer at Grand Rounds, Stride, and Doctor on Demand. He is a former Director at Castlight Health (CSLT). Additionally, he is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, Senior Fellow and Advisory Board Member at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC, and Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution Engleberg Center for Health Reform. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Harvard Medical School Health Care Policy Department, National Institute of Healthcare Management (NIHCM), and ChildObesity180. He is also a member of the Health Affairs Editorial Board.
Prior to Venrock, Dr. Kocher served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy on the National Economic Council. He was one of the leaders of the First Lady's "Let's Move" childhood obesity initiative, and led the formation of the Partnership for a Healthier America. He also co-founded with Todd Park the Health Data Initiative, a joint effort of HHS and the Institute of Medicine, to release healthcare data to spur private sector innovation to improve healthcare cost and quality. Previously Dr. Kocher was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where he led McKinsey Global Institute's healthcare economics work and Center for US Health System Reform. For the past five years, Dr. Kocher has served as Co-Chair of the Health Datapalooza.
Dr. Kocher received undergraduate degrees from the University of Washington and a medical degree from George Washington University. He completed a research fellowship with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health, and went on to complete his internal medicine residency training at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard Medical School.
Dan Ebner was a 2019 Zetema Project Fellow, during which he focused specifically on the intersection of health care policy and digital health/technology. Currently he is a visiting clinical researcher at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan and member of the MIT Critical Data research group. He will join the University of California Irvine for his internship, before joining the Mayo Clinic for his residency in Radiation Oncology. Prior to joining the Zetema Project, Dr Ebner worked as an independent consultant for the Japanese government, as well as performed translational, clinical, and public health research with teams at Kyoto University, The University of Tokyo, and most recently the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan. He currently focuses his time on the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence and technological entrepreneurship within medicine, and on the role of high-energy particle beams in directed cancer care. He earned his medical degree with a concentration on global health from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he served as Student Body President. He earned his Master in Public Health from Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, concentrating on Health Policy and Management, and where he was a Siegrist Family Fellow.
Gail Wilensky, Ph.D. is an economist and senior fellow at Project HOPE, an international health foundation. She directed the Medicare and Medicaid programs from 1990 to 1992 and served in the White House as a senior health and welfare adviser to President GHW Bush. Dr. Wilensky currently serves as a trustee of the Combined Benefits Fund of the United Mine Workers of America and the National Opinion Research Center, is on the Board of Regents of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), and a director of the Geisinger Health System Foundation. She served as president of the Defense Health Board, a Federal advisory to the Secretary of Defense, was a commissioner on the World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health and co-chaired the Dept. of Defense Task Force on the Future of Military Health Care.
She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) and has served two terms on its governing board. She is a director of United HealthGroup, Quest Diagnostics and BrainScope and has been a director of several other public companies. She is also a former chair of the board of Academy Health, a former trustee of the American Heart Association and a current or former director of numerous other non-profit organizations. From 1997 to 2001, she chaired the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on payment and other issues relating to Medicare and previously chaired one of its predecessor commissions, the Physician Payment Review Commission. From 2001 to 2003, she co-chaired the President's Task Force to Improve Health Care Delivery for Our Nation's Veterans and in 2007, served as a Commissioner on the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors (Dole/Shalala Commission).
She received a bachelor's degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan and has received several honorary degrees.
James L. Madara, MD serves as the CEO and executive vice president of the American Medical Association. Since taking the reins of the AMA in 2011, Dr. Madara has helped sculpt the organization's visionary long-term strategic plan. Prior to arriving at the AMA, Dr. Madara spent the first 22 years of his career at Harvard Medical School, receiving both clinical and research training, serving as a tenured professor and as director of the NIH-sponsored Harvard Digestive Diseases Center. Following five years as chair of pathology at Emory, Dr. Madara served as dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospitals at the University of Chicago, bringing together the university's biomedical research, teaching and clinical activities. Dr. Madara also served as senior advisor with Leavitt Partners, an innovative health care consulting and private-equity firm founded by former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mike Leavitt.
Having published more than 200 original papers and chapters, Dr. Madara has received both national and international awards, and served as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Pathology and as president of the American Board of Pathology. In addition to Modern Healthcare consistently naming him as one of the nation's 50 most influential physician executives, as well as one of the nation's 100 most influential people in health care, he is a past recipient of a prestigious MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. He received the 2011 Davenport Award for lifetime achievement in gastrointestinal disease from the American Physiological Society and the 2011 Mentoring Award for lifetime achievement from the American Gastroenterological Society. Dr. Madara is an elected member of both the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. He also co-chairs the Value Incentives and Systems Innovation Collaborative of the National Academy of Medicine(NAM), and is a member of NAM's Leadership Consortium for Value & Science-Driven Health Care.
Karen Hsu was a 2019 Zetema Project Fellow and graduated in 2020 with her dual MBA/MPH degree from the Yale School of Management and School of Public Health. Since graduating, she was recruited to assist the co-chairs of Governor Ned Lamont's Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group, serving in a project management and policy research role to safely reopen Connecticut's economy and education system during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Karen completed her graduate internship at UCLA Health, where she worked as an Administrative Intern under executive administration at the UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a Project Coordinator at the Pacific Business Group on Health, managing statewide quality improvement trainings on medically complex care and primary care practice transformation. She previously worked as a Compliance Associate at the Center for Elders' Independence, a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) serving chronically ill seniors in the East Bay.
Karen earned her BA in Public Health from UC Berkeley.
Mark McClellan, MD, Ph.D. is the Robert J. Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine, and Policy, and Director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University with offices at Duke and in Washington DC. Dr. McClellan is a doctor and an economist, and his work has addressed a wide range of strategies and policy reforms to improve health care, including such areas as payment reform to promote better outcomes and lower costs, methods for development and use of real-world evidence, and more effective drug and device innovation.
Before coming to Duke, he served as a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he was Director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiatives and led the Richard Merkin Initiative on Payment Reform and Clinical Leadership. Dr. McClellan is a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he developed and implemented major reforms in health policy. These include the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Medicare and Medicaid payment reforms, the FDA's Critical Path Initiative, and public-private initiatives to develop better information on the quality and cost of care.
Dr. McClellan is the founding chair and a current board member of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and chairs the Academy's Leadership Council for Value and Science-Driven Health care, co-chairs the guiding committee of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, and is are search associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has also previously served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and senior director for health care policy at the White House, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury. He was previously an associate professor of economics and medicine with tenure at Stanford University, and has twice received the Kenneth Arrow Award for Outstanding Research in Health Economics.
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Founder
- Healthcare Advisor
Mark Zitter, MBA is the Founder and Chair of the Zetema Project. He founded the Project in 2016 to help inform and energize the national healthcare conversation. He was the Chairman and Founder of Zitter Health Insights, a business intelligence firm that provides insights focused on optimizing patient access to pharmaceuticals to life science companies, specialty pharmacies, and managed healthcare organizations. In 2019, Zitter Health Insights was sold to MMIT, a product, solutions and advisory company that brings transparency to pharmacy and medical benefit information. Mr. Zitter was co-founder and CEO of Vital Decisions, a telephone counseling company for patients with life-limiting illnesses, which was sold to MTS Partners (now Windrose Health Partners) in 2012.
Mr. Zitter serves as healthcare advisor and facilitator for the California Health Reform Initiative. He also is on the advisory boards of Riverside Partners, a private equity firm, and the behavior change company Motimatic. He has authored four books and numerous articles on healthcare. Mr. Zitter founded the Society of Chief Medical Officers and has been an editorial advisor for Evidence-Based Oncology and Pharmaceutical Executive. He has produced and chaired many of the nation's largest conferences on specialty pharmacy, quality improvement, disease management, and pharmacoeconomics. He was publisher of the first newsletters in outcomes management and pharmacoeconomics.
Mr. Zitter holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BA from Wesleyan University. He has been an invited speaker at hundreds of meetings, and has been a guest lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard School of Public Health, Yale Medical School, Haas Business School at UC Berkeley, and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is past Chairman of SFJAZZ and is on the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, where he hosts healthcare programs and chairs a series on end-of-life issues.
Job Titles:
- Senior Strategic Advisor at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina
Meril was a Fall 2018 Zetema Fellow. She earned her Master of Public Policy degree from Duke, where she was a Margolis Scholar in Health Policy and Management, and her BS in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell.
Meril is a Senior Strategic Advisor at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. There, she specializes in developing alternative payment models and clinical pathways for specialty care. Her policy interests include high-value health care reform, value-based insurance design, and insurance financing to address social drivers of health. In her graduate program, she researched value-based payment contracts for prescription drugs, implementation challenges for payment reform, and workplace wellness solutions. She also was a taskforce lead for a Duke-Durham partnership to provide closed-loop referrals for non-medical needs and served as an ACA Navigator during open enrollment. Meril started her career in health care consulting, where she spent five years supporting clients in the pharma, patient experience, health tech, and revenue cycle management spaces.
Job Titles:
- Senior Vice President of Eli Lilly and Company
Patrik Jonsson is senior vice president of Eli Lilly and Company, president of Lilly USA and chief customer officer.
Previously, Patrik was president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, also a senior vice president role. Since joining Lilly in 1991 as a sales representative, Patrik has held a number of positions in sales, marketing and general management. He served as European marketing director for Zyprexa and the neuroscience customer group, as managing director of Sweden and later of Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark), and as president and general manager of Eli Lilly Italia. In 2012, when Lilly announced a new structure for the company's European business, Patrik assumed additional responsibilities for the countries in central and southeastern Europe. In 2014, he became president and general manager of Lilly Japan.
Patrik is a business graduate from Lund University, School of Economics and Management, in Sweden. He is the past chair of the Japan-based executive committee of PhRMA, and served on the board of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan.
Richard Lu was a 2021 Zetema Project Fellow and is currently a 2022 MD candidate at Harvard Medical School.
Richard's work aims to dismantle the systemic and institutional barriers that prevent millions of Americans from adequate healthcare access. This drive is informed by a variety of healthcare experiences, which have spanned involvement in opportunities ranging from designing electronic health record systems in Kenya to understanding vaccine development barriers in South Africa to assisting U.S. state governments with healthcare payment reform efforts while at McKinsey & Company. Richard is a founding member of Off Their Plate, a non-profit developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide economic relief to restaurants and meals for healthcare workers and communities in need.
Richard earned an MBA and MSc in Global Health Science at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated with a BA in Chemistry with minors in Global Health and Health Policy from Princeton University, where he served as a 2016 Class Officer and Resident Advisor prior to enrolling in graduate school.
Sophie Rottenberg was a 2019 Zetema Project Fellow and in 2020 received her MSPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a concentration in Health Policy and Management.
Since joining the Zetema Project as a Fellow, Sophie has worked at MITRE Corporation, a federally -funded research and development center, as a Healthcare Policy Analyst. Previously, she has also served as a Project Analyst at Discern Health, a small consulting firm in Baltimore, MD. She has also has expertise in grants management where she served as the grants liaison at the Baltimore City Fire Department. Before beginning her Master's degree she worked as a medical assistant for a small nonprofit gynecology practice that focused on the health and wellness of the dual eligible population.
Sophie earned her dual BS in Biology and International Affairs at Florida State University.
Job Titles:
- Project Associate, the
- the Project Associate
Sumera C. Yego is the Project Associate of the Zetema Project. Sumera studies the US healthcare system and provides support to the administrative functioning of the project. Sumera is the primary point of contact for Zetema Project Panelists and their support staff, fellows, journalists, and other Project stakeholders. Sumera manages work plans, oversees calendars, manages financial processing, and contributes to the organization's content development.
William L. Haar, MPH, MSW is the Director of the Zetema Project. His role is to facilitate a forum that stimulates the productive exchange of diverse, expert opinion on the many facets of the US healthcare system. Mr. Haar recruits and coordinates healthcare leaders from across the political spectrum and the major healthcare stakeholder groups.