André Blackman
Founder & CEO, Onboard Health
Twitter: @MindofAndre
André is a pioneering strategist with deep ties into the public health/healthcare, social innovation, and strategic communication landscapes. He is dedicated to building the future of health through an inclusive lens. André is a sought-after advisor to companies building the future of health and brand builder for the leaders who run them. His work and insights have been featured in CIO, Fortune, Forbes, NPR, Reporting on Health, U.S. News and World Report.
Karen DeSalvo, MD, MPH, MSc
Chief Health Officer, Google
Twitter: @KBDeSalvo
Dr. Karen DeSalvo is the Chief Health Officer of Google Health. She is a physician executive working at the intersection of medicine, public health, and information technology whose career has focused on improving health and eliminating disparities. She leads a team of health professionals at Google who provide clinical guidance for the development of inclusive research, products and services. Prior to joining Google, Dr. DeSalvo was National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and acted as the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Obama Administration. During her time at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. DeSalvo focused on creating a more consumer-oriented, transparent and value-based health system. Dr. DeSalvo served as the New Orleans Health Commissioner following Hurricane Katrina. Prior to that she was Vice Dean for Community Affairs and Health Policy at the Tulane School of Medicine where she was a practicing internal medicine physician, educator, researcher and leader. She serves on the Council of the National Academy of Medicine.
Lisa Fitzpatrick, MD, MPH
Founder and CEO, Grapevine Health
Twitter: @askdrfitz
Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, MD, MPH is a CDC-trained medical epidemiologist and board-certified infectious diseases physician, and founder and CEO of Grapevine Health – a health media company bringing trusted healthcare information to underserved communities through tech and touch.
Abner Mason
Founder and CEO of ConsejoSano, a patient engagement solution designed to reach underserved communities.
Twitter: @AbnerMason
Abner Mason is a healthcare technology leader who’s dedicated to creating a more just, equitable, and effective healthcare system. As the founder and CEO of ConsejoSano, a multicultural patient engagement company, he leads a team of diverse professionals who strive every day to improve outcomes and lower costs on behalf of health plans. He’s also the founder and chair of HealthTech 4 Medicaid, a nonprofit composed of innovative leaders working to radically change the pace of innovation to improve care quality and access. He serves on the boards of the California Black Health Network, and Manifest MedEx (www.manifestmedex.org), California’s largest health information exchange (HIE), and he is a member of the American Medical Association’s External Equity & Innovation Advisory Group. Abner was also a member of the Biden-Harris Policy Committee. A federal and state government policy veteran with deep experience fighting the HIV/AIDS crisis, Abner knows how to tap people’s unique talents and innate sense of compassion to achieve big goals.
Pooja Mittal, DO
Medical Director, Population Health Equity, HealthNet
Adjunct Associate Professor, Stanford Dept of Family Medicine
Adjunct Associate Professor, UCSF Department of Family and Community Medicine
Dr. Mittal is a Medical Director of Population Health Equity at HealthNet. She is a family physician and uses this lens to design strategic initiatives to improve care for the most vulnerable. She has expertise in digital health through her work in the HealthNet Digital Platforms Workgroup devising a defined digital strategy to support quality and member engagement for MediCal members. Dr. Mittal also works at the National Clinicians Consultation Center at UCSF, a national HIV/AIDS warmline, where she is recognized as a national expert on Perinatal HIV care. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. In addition to her clinical work, she has published in the areas of well-child care, group visits, preconception care, health equity, and perinatal HIV.
Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS
Senior Advisor, White House COVID-19 Response Team; Chair, COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, Department of Health and Human Services
Twitter: @DrNunezSmith
Dr. Nunez-Smith is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Public Health, and Management; Inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research; Founding Director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC); Director of the Center for Research Engagement (CRE); Associate Cancer Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at Yale Cancer Center; Chief Health Equity Officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital; Deputy Director for Health Equity Research and Workforce Development at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation; Core Faculty in the National Clinician Scholars Program; Research Faculty in the Global Health Leadership Initiative; Director of the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership; and Co-Director of the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship.
Dr. Nunez-Smith’s research focuses on promoting health and healthcare equity for structurally marginalized populations with an emphasis on centering community engagement, supporting healthcare workforce diversity and development, developing patient reported measurements of healthcare quality, and identifying regional strategies to reduce the global burden of non-communicable diseases. Dr. Nunez-Smith has extensive expertise in examining the effects of social and structural determinants of health, systemic influences contributing to health disparities, health equity improvement, and community-academic partnered scholarship. In addition to this extensive experience in primary data collection, management, and analysis, ERIC has institutional expertise in qualitative and mixed methods, population health, and medical informatics.
She is the principal investigator on many NIH and foundation-funded research projects, including an NIH/NCI-funded project to develop a tool to assess patient reported experiences of discrimination in healthcare. She has conducted an investigation of the promotion and retention of diversity in academic medical school faculty and has published numerous articles on the experiences of minority students and faculty. Funded by NIH/NIMHD, she established the Eastern Caribbean Health Outcomes Research Network (ECHORN), a research collaborative across four Eastern Caribbean islands, supporting several chronic disease research projects and enhancing health outcomes research and leadership capacity in the region; the flagship ECHORN Cohort Study recruited and is following a community-dwelling adult cohort (n=3000) to examine novel chronic disease risk and protective factors. She recently received NIH/NHLBI funding to build upon this work by recruiting children into an expanded intergenerational ECHORN cohort, inclusive of a biorepository. She is also PI on one of five NIH/NIMHD-funded Transdisciplinary Collaborative Centers on Health Disparities focused on Precision Medicine, which leverages the ECHORN infrastructure to conduct collaborative research on hypertension and diabetes.
Most recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shed national attention on the health and healthcare disparities of marginalized populations, she was called upon to serve on the Governor’s ReOpen CT Advisory Group and to chair its Community Committee. She served as an Advisor to the Biden-Harris campaign, and subsequently named co-chair of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board and will serve as chair of the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force in the administration. She also received NIH funding to leverage ECHORN to improve the COVID-19 testing cascade in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
Dr. Nunez-Smith has mentored dozens of trainees since completing fellowship and has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring. She is board certified in internal medicine, having completed residency training at Harvard University’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fellowship at the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, where she also received a Masters in Health Sciences. Originally from the US Virgin Islands, she attended Jefferson Medical College, where she was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, and she earned a BA in Biological Anthropology and Psychology at Swarthmore College.
Michael Penn, PhD, MD
Founder & Managing Director, Health Equity Ventures
Dr. Michael L. Penn, Jr. is founder and Managing Director of Health Equity Ventures--an advisory group and emerging investment fund supporting companies leveraging technology and data to accelerate healthcare transformation for underserved populations. He is laser-focused on advancing the development of talent, technologies, and companies that enable wellbeing for all. He began his career at Genentech working in Marketing and Business Development roles for nearly ten years and was later recruited to become a Vice President at the Gladstone Institutes, responsible for strategy, diversity and mentoring; then later served as CEO of the Gladstone Foundation. He is a co-author of the book Finding Your North and co-founder of the non-profit, Building Diversity in Science—a non-profit that encouraged students of color to pursue careers in science. Dr. Penn was also appointed by former Mayor Willie Brown to serve as one of seven Commissioners responsible for governing San Francisco’s Department of Public Health. He currently sits on the Board of Trustees at St. Francis Memorial Hospital, a Dignity Health community hospital and the Bay Area Board of Summer Search.
Carmen A. Peralta, MD, MAS
Chief Medical Officer Cricket Health
Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Co-Founder Kidney Health Research Collaborative at UCSF
Twitter: @Peralta_KHRC
Dr. Carmen A. Peralta is Chief Medical Officer Cricket Health, Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Co-Founder of the Kidney Health Research Collaborative at UCSF. She is a nationally recognized leader in kidney disease epidemiology. At UCSF, she distinguished herself as a clinician investigator where she has published more than 150 research articles and received top academic awards. At UCSF and the San Francisco VA, she Co-Founded and served as inaugural Executive Director of the Kidney Health Research Collaborative (KHRC). She is well known for her work to improve early detection and management of kidney disease as well as contributions to the understanding of race/ethnic disparities in kidney health. At Cricket Health, she leads the clinical strategy to develop a technology-enabled model of kidney care for persons with advanced kidney disease. She brings her deep experience in clinical care, research methods and implementation to build a holistic approach kidney care that aims to improve the lives of persons living with kidney disease.
Edmondo Robinson, MD, MBA, MS, FACP
Senior Vice President/Chief Digital Innovation Officer, Moffitt Cancer Center
Twitter: @EdmondoRobinson
Dr. Robinson is responsible for leveraging the tools of IT, Health Data Services and Digital in order to expand Moffitt’s ecosystem to deliver on consumer-oriented, real-world solutions for clinical practice, research, education, and administrative processes. The Digital Innovation team aims to create and test new services, programs, partnerships, and technologies that leverage digital innovations, while challenging the status quo to reduce the cost of care, improve quality, increase access to care, and enhance the patient experience. In addition, he directly cares for Moffitt patients as part of the Internal and Hospital Medicine Program.
Previously, Dr. Robinson was the Chief Transformation Officer and Senior Vice President of Consumerism at ChristianaCare, one of the largest health systems in the mid-Atlantic. He was responsible for the transformation of health care delivery to advance population health initiatives and the move from volume-based to value-based care with a special focus on developing and managing ChristianaCare’s consumerism and digital strategies.
Dr. Robinson is an associate professor at University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine and an adjunct senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a senior fellow of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He holds a medical degree from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles; an MBA with an emphasis in health care management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; and a master’s degree in health policy research also from the University of Pennsylvania.
Micky Tripathi, PhD, MPP
National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, US Department of Health & Human Services
Twitter: @MickyTripathi1
Micky Tripathi is the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he leads the formulation of the federal health IT strategy and coordinates federal health IT policies, standards, programs, and investments.
Dr. Tripathi has over 20 years of experience across the health IT landscape. He most recently served as Chief Alliance Officer for Arcadia, a health care data and software company focused on population health management and value-based care, the project manager of the Argonaut Project, an industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of FHIR, and a board member of HL7, the Sequoia Project, the CommonWell Health Alliance, and the CARIN Alliance.
Dr. Tripathi served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), a non-profit health IT advisory and clinical data analytics company. He was also the founding President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, a statewide HIE partnered with the Regenstrief Institute, an Executive Advisor to investment firm LRVHealth, and a Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Reed Tuckson, MD, FACP
Managing Director, Tuckson Health Connections, LLC
Founding Member, Black Coalition Against COVID
Twitter: @DrReedTuckson
Reed V. Tuckson, M.D., F.A.C.P., is Managing Director of Tuckson Health Connections, LLC, a health and medical care consulting business that brings people and ideas together to promote optimal health outcomes and value through innovation and integration across the fields of prevention; public health; consumer activation; quality care delivery; the translation of science and technology into value producing interventions; and optimization of big data and analytics. Previously, he enjoyed a long tenure as Executive Vice President and Chief of Medical Affairs for UnitedHealth Group; Senior Vice President for Professional Standards of the AMA; Senior Vice President of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation; President of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science; and Commissioner of Public Health for the District of Columbia.
Currently, Dr. Tuckson is President of the American Telemedicine Association and he serves on the Board of Directors of LifePoint Health, a leading hospital company dedicated to providing high-value care and services to growing regions, rural communities and vibrant small towns across the nation; Cell Therapeutics, Inc., a public corporation concerned with the development of cancer pharmaceuticals; and he is a special advisor to the CEO of ViTel Net, LLC, a leading innovator in telehealth solutions. Additionally, he serves on the National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health of the National Institutes of Health; he is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, serving in a leadership position on the use of data and analytics in healthcare; he is a Board Member of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which is concerned with advancing humanism in medical care; an Advisory Board Member of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics; and a Trustee of the Board of Howard University.