Faculty

Laurence Chait, MBA

Strategic Planning and Value Creation in Integrated Healthcare

Larry Chait is Managing Director of Chait and Associates, Inc., a consultancy that advises senior management on achieving and sustaining high performance. He has over thirty years of experience in business management and information technology. In his consulting work, Larry has helped executives and organizations across industries manage change. His focus is on strategic business planning, business process improvement, knowledge management, and change management. He has consulted to Global 100s and startups internationally, including industrial corporations, professional-service firms, associations, and nonprofits.

Prior to forming Chait and Associates, Larry was a Vice President and Director of Arthur D. Little, Inc. He held several positions at ADL, including chief knowledge officer, consulting director and principal, and product manager for turnkey systems. While at ADL, Larry developed the firm’s Business Process Improvement methodology and built its BPI practice, consulting to firms globally and teaching the methodology to hundreds of ADL and client staff members. Before joining ADL, Larry was president of his own retail organization and vice president of product development of a national commercial data processing services company.

Larry has authored three books on information technology and human resources; is a contributing author of “Managing the Learning Process of the Corporation” and “Knowledge Management in Practice: Connections and Context” and is currently writing another book with the working title of “Practical Knowledge Management.” He has lectured in programs at seven universities; written over 20 articles published in the U.S. and abroad; and spoken at over 40 conferences on topics including the management of change, process improvement, and knowledge management. Larry is president of the Boston KM Forum, an organization serving practitioners in Knowledge Management.

Larry received his AB in Economics from Cornell University and his MBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration.

Joseph Coyne, Dr.P.H.

Financial Decisions in the Changing Healthcare Landscape

Joseph S. Coyne is Chair and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration, and Director of the Center for International Health Services Research and Policy at Washington State University. Dr. Coyne has been twice designated a W.K. Kellogg Fellow and is the 2004 recipient of the WSU Faculty Excellence Award. His research has been funded with over $1.1 million in extramural support, and he has served as a financial adviser to domestic and international healthcare companies.

Dr. Coyne is a cum laude graduate of the School of Business Administration at the University of Notre Dame, and earned MPH and DrPH degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Dore, PharmD, PhD

Data-Driven Decision Making:  The Structure, Conduct, Review, and Evaluation of Research

David Dore is a pharmacoepidemiologist and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Health Services, Policy and Practice and Epidemiology in the Program in Public Health at Brown University. He received a PharmD from the University of Rhode Island, a PhD in epidemiology from Brown Medical School, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research at Brown University. His principal area of research interest is the non-experimental study of drug effects, with applications to drug safety and comparative effectiveness research. Most of his work has involved understanding and using health insurance claims data for this purpose. His methodological expertise covers topics related to studying medical interventions in the setting of non-randomized treatment groups and incomplete data (i.e., claims data). His work has been published in several journals, including the Annals of Internal Medicine, and he serves as a peer-reviewer for a range of clinical and epidemiologic journals.

Prior to joining the Brown faculty full-time in 2011, he worked as Senior Scientist at OptumInsight Epidemiology (formerly i3 Drug Safety), an independent research consultancy that conducts pharmacoepidemiologic studies for the biopharmaceutical industry, mostly in the area of drug and vaccine safety. In his consulting practice, he led several post-approval safety studies of drugs and vaccines. Essentially all of his work was based on commercial health insurance claims data and supplemented with information from abstracted medical records. In the case of two projects, he coordinated other research groups, requiring the development of study designs that allowed pooling of aggregate-level data across sites to preserve patient confidentiality.

The US Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies worldwide have been principal consumers of his research output, and he remains involved with independent, industry-funded drug and vaccine safety research as PI or site PI of several ongoing projects. During his time at OptumInsight, he served as adjunct faculty in the Department of Community Health at Brown University, teaching epidemiology to medical and graduate students.

David Dosa, MD, MPH

Navigating the Regulatory Maze

David Dosa is Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He is a health services researcher and practicing geriatrician with duel appointments with the Department of Primary Care at the Providence VAMC and the Division of Geriatrics at Rhode Island Hospital. David is a funded researcher with grants from the National Institutes of Aging, the Research Retirement Foundation, and the Veteran’s Administration. He jointly conducts his research through Brown University’s Center for Gerontology and the Providence VA Medical Center’s Research Enhancement Award Program.

David’s current research interests include nursing home quality improvement, nursing home response to hurricane disasters, nursing home infections, and medication errors in the elderly. His research awards and commendations include a Merck New Investigator Award in 2006 through the American Geriatrics Society. He is also a Hartford Foundation Scholar, and the recipient of the 2012 Humanitarian Award from the American Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Dr. Dosa is the New York Times bestselling author of Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat. The book has been published in over 20 countries worldwide.

Apurv Gupta, MD, MPH

Dr. Apurv Gupta is Adjunct Senior Lecturer of Healthcare Leadership at Brown University. He is a co-founder of Physician Performance Improvement Institute, and catalyst to a number of healthcare entrepreneurial ventures. He has held numerous leadership positions in the healthcare industry including Vice President for Network Performance Improvement at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Chief Medical Officer at Quincy Medical Center, Medical Director at Norwood Hospital, and Associate Medical Director at Beth Israel Deaconess Physicians Organization.

Dr. Gupta has significant experience with quality improvement, clinical process redesign, change management, cultural transformation, and physician engagement. His measurable successes include Transitions of Care, Diabetes, Venous Thrombo-Embolism Prophylaxis, Congestive Heart Failure, Stroke, Patient Flow, and Patient Satisfaction. He also has considerable expertise in conflict mediation, infrastructure building, team-building, and leadership development.

Dr. Gupta completed a Residency in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital/ Harvard Medical School. He has a ScB and MD from Brown University, and an MPH from Harvard University School of Public Health. In 2011, Dr. Gupta received the Bharat Samman Award from the NRI Institute; in 2009, he received the American Medical Association Foundation Leadership Award, as well as the Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business Award from the Asian American Business Development Center. He is a Trustee and Past President of the Indian Medical Association of New England and on the Board of Directors of Friends of Shelter Associates.

Roee Gutman, PhD

Data-Driven Decision Making:  The Structure, Conduct, Review, and Evaluation of Research

Roee Gutman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at Brown University. Roee’s areas of interest and research are Bayesian data analysis, missing data, matching, causal inference and bioinformatics. His current research projects focus on developing techniques to make more accurate, or at least defensible, “causal inferences” from epidemiological studies. In layman’s terms: he is interested in finding out, for example, if drinking alcohol actually makes someone live longer and is not just associated with living longer.

Roee received his PhD from the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. His advisor was Professor Donald Rubin and he was a member of Professor Jun Liu’s lab. His PhD thesis is entitled: “Topics in Missing Data and Causality.” Roee received a BS with Honors in Statistics, Operations Research and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University (TAU) in 1999. He went on to receive a MS in Applied Statistics with Special Honors under the supervision of Professor Yossef Hochberg from TAU.

Donna Malvey, PhD

Management and Marketing for Healthcare Transformation

Donna Malvey is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Management and Informatics at the University of Central Florida.  She received her Master’s Degree in Health Services Administration from George Washington University and completed an administrative residency and postgraduate fellowship in health systems at the VA Medical Center in Washington, DC.  She earned her PhD in Administration-Health Services from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and received a national award from Sodexho Marriott for her dissertation research on medical group practices.

Donna is a nationally known speaker with audiences of practitioner organizations and academic conferences. She has been interviewed in the press and on television about health care issues, ranging from physician unions to retail health care.  Her funded research includes a study of patient flow management in local public health departments, which was underwritten by a grant from IBM.

Donna has published extensively in the health care field. She is co-author of The Retail Revolution in Health Care, which was published by Praeger, 2010, and received a recommendation from the American Library Association’s Choice Review. This book examines the silent revolution in health care delivery that is being driven by the private sector. She is currently at work on a book about mobile health applications and their impact on healthcare service delivery.

Donna is a reviewer for a number of health care management journals and has served as a member of the editorial advisory board of Health Care Management Review. She was appointed by the Governor of Florida to serve two terms as a member of the Florida Cancer Control and Research Advisory Board. Donna has worked in a variety of health care settings, and served as the executive director of a national trade association that represents health professionals in private practice.  She also has worked as a congressional aide on Capitol Hill. 

Mark Schneider, MBA

Information-Empowered Patient Care: Electronic Health Records, Health Information Technology and Medical Information Systems

Mark Schneider is a Vice President with MedStar, a $4B provider organization serving the Washington Baltimore area. Mark directs the software procurement, implementation and support for MedStar’s hospitals, clinics, insurance businesses, pharmacies, physician offices, and research organizations. Balancing the driving forces of federal regulations, rapidly changing technology, changing clinician expectations, patient safety, data security and tightening budgets, Mark has staged and driven the development of electronic medical records within the organizations. This has involved careful planning to map to organizational business strategy, the need to both protect and leverage the new data stores, and to connect to other EMR’s inside and outside the organization. As a result of his efforts, MedStar Health has been recognized for the eighth time as one of the nation’s MOST WIRED according to the results of the 2012 Most Wired Survey in the July issue of Hospitals & Health Networks magazine.

Prior to his work with MedStar, Mark was a Vice President with IDX/GE, a publicly traded firm providing both clinical and business software to health care providers. Before that Mark spent 18 years in consulting, providing counseling and health information strategies to large integrated health networks, Fortune 100 technology firms and foreign governments. He has lectured at Cornell, MIT and Harvard’s School of Public Health as well as numerous national and international conferences. In 1995 he co-authored a book Patient Care Information Systems that was awarded book of the year by the Health Information Management Systems Society.

Mark received his Biology and Psychology degrees from the University of Rochester. He also graduated from Cornell’s Sloan Program in Health Administration and earned his MBA from Cornell’s Johnson School of Management.

Renee Shield, PhD

Renee Shield, PhD, is Professor of Health Services Policy & Practice (Clinical) at Brown University at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research and the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Dr. Shield is a cultural and medical anthropologist with extensive qualitative and mixed methods research experience in long term care and other healthcare settings, in solo research and in coordination with interdisciplinary research teams. Dr. Shield’s research interests have centered on resident, family and staff experiences in long term care, physician-patient communication, end of life care, the impact of reform "culture change" practices in long term care facilities, the implementation and impact of electronic health records and health information exchange on patients and physicians, and the transformation process of the patient-centered medical home model in medical practices. Dr. Shield has also applied much of her research, evaluation and mixed methods experience in educational initiatives in medical school curricular development and in healthcare programs. These efforts include integrating geriatrics into a medical school curriculum, developing a curriculum to improve medical students’ communication skills with patients, families and healthcare teams, creating a website of educational resources on suicide prevention for secondary to post-graduate and healthcare professional levels, and evaluating the development of the Health Information Exchange initiative in Rhode Island.

Terrie Fox Wetle, PhD

Dr. Wetle is Associate Dean of Medicine for Public Health and Public Policy, and is Professor of Health Services Research, Policy and Practice. She was most recently Deputy Director, National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health. Formerly, she was Director for the Braceland Center for Mental Health and Aging at the Institute of Living; and Associate Professor of Community Medicine and Healthcare, University of Connecticut Health Center, School of Medicine. She is former Associate Director of the Division on Aging and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At Yale, she was Director of the Program in Long Term Care Administration and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health. She previously worked in federal government as a Social Policy Analyst for the Administration on Aging, DHHS, and in local government as director of an Area Agency on Aging in Portland, Oregon. She is Past-President of the Gerontological Society of America and past President of the American Federation for Aging Research. She recently was awarded a Docteure Honoris Causa by the University of Geneva and the Donald P. Kent Award by the Gerontological Society of America. She is appointed to the NIH National Advisory Council on Aging and the NIH Council on Councils.

Ira Wilson, MD, MSc

Dr. Wilson is interested in how structural features of healthcare systems affect the interactions between physicians and patients, and how those interactions in turn affect patients' health outcomes. To study these relationships he has studied patients with chronic conditions such as the elderly, persons with depression, and persons with HIV. Recently he his research has focused on understanding and improving the quality of medication prescribing and medication management.

Dr. Wilson graduated from Harvard College with a BA in Social Studies. He worked as Director of the Adolescent Center of Rincon, Puerto Rico for several years before returning to Boston to attending medical school. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1987, and completed a residency in Internal Medicine (Primary Care Pathway) at Beth Israel in Boston, MA. Dr. Wilson was Chief Medical Resident at Beth Israel and a fellow in the Harvard General Medicine Program. In 1993 he joined the faculty at Tufts Medical Center where he rose to the rank of Professor in 2006. In 2010 he moved to Brown to become Chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy & Practice.

Jennie Aizenman, PhD

Program Director, The Critical Challenge: Capstone Projects

Program Director Jennifer Aizenman received her PhD in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and completed postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University. She has served as Director of Science Studies in Continuing Education; Director of Project ARISE: Advancing RI Science Education, an NIH-funded program for life science teachers; and as Manager of Science Education at the DNA Learning Center in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Additionally, Dr. Aizenman has held an adjunct faculty position in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University.