The Questions We Pursue
The Questions We Pursue Series was launched as a platform to hear from diverse professionals on what problems they are working to solve. The goal is to learn more about the work being done and what our (individuals, organizations, or society) role could be in helping solve these issues.
Guest Speakers
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Moz Siddiqui
“Modern injustices of today, of modern day, is lack of equitable access to healthcare for real disadvantaged communities globally, and within that children. I think one of the things that I’m trying to solve for is how do we improve access to children in some of the poorest countries who often have the largest burden of disease and constraint - and increase that access to one of the most cost-effective interventions out there, which is vaccines.” - Moz Siddiqui
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Moz Siddiqui, LLB, M.Sc., is based in Geneva and heads up the Private Sector Partnerships and Innovations team at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Moz is focused on forging strategic partnerships with the corporate sector to address the main challenges in vaccinating children in some of the world’s poorest countries. Leveraging funding, expertise, and innovation from the corporations and startups, his team manages a portfolio of innovative, technology driven, projects including vaccine delivery by drones, big data and AI platforms for identify missed communities, generating demand through digital tools, and enhancing frontline health worker capabilities. Moz has been directly engaged in COVAX, the global mechanism to end the Covid-19 pandemic, mobilisation private capital and innovations to accelerate vaccine purchase and delivery. Moz has over 15 years of experience working across the legal, consulting, IT, and development sectors.
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Dr. James G. Stevenson
“Today's medication use process is highly dependent on manual processes and involves very disjointed and fragmented technology. The goal is to automate and transform the medication use processes across the care continuum in order to reduce the dependence on human performance and to enable advanced data analytics to achieve improved outcomes.” - Dr. James G. Stevenson
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Dr. James G. Stevenson is currently Professor Emeritus in the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy and Chief Clinical Officer for Omnicell. James G. Stevenson, PharmD, FASHP, FFIP, served as Chief Pharmacy Officer in the UM Health System and Associate Dean for Clinical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy from 1999-2014. From 2014-2018 he served as President of Visante, a medication management consulting company. He received his BS Pharm and PharmD degrees from Wayne State University. Previously he served on the faculty of West Virginia University and at Wayne State University, where he directed the Graduate Program in Health Systems Pharmacy Management. He has been Director of Pharmacy Services at West Virginia University Hospitals and at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Dr. Stevenson was also Executive Director of Pharmacy Services for the eight-hospital Detroit Medical Center. He received the Pharmacist of the Year award from both the Michigan Society of Health-System Pharmacists and the Michigan Pharmacists Association and has received the John W. Webb Lecture Award and the Award for Distinguished Leadership in Health System Pharmacy Practice from ASHP. He has twice received the ASHP Foundation’s Innovation in Pharmacy Practice Literature Award. He served on the ASHP Board of Directors and was an officer in the Hospital Pharmacy Section and received the Distinguished Practice Award in 2021 from the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP). He also completed two terms of service on the Michigan Board of Pharmacy. His research is in practice management, informatics, outcomes, and medication safety.
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Dr. Claire Bloomfield
“The challenge I’m working in is how can we support both national and international research and innovation with health data.” - Dr. Claire Bloomfield
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Dr. Claire Bloomfield is Deputy Director for the Data for R&D, Centre for Improving Data Collaboration at the NHS Transformation Directorate. Dr. Bloomfield is based at the Centre for Improving Data Collaboration as the Deputy Director and SRO for the Data for Research and Development (R&D) programme. She oversees development and delivery of NHS coordinated investments in health data for R&D, to support the ambitions of the Life Sciences Vision and Vision for future of UK Clinical Research Delivery. Prior to joining CIDC, Dr. Bloomfield was the CEO of the world-leading UK National Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligent in Medical Imaging (NCIMI), at the University of Oxford. NCIMI is a launchpad to improve the healthcare industry through the use of AI.
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Dr. Julie Lauffenburger
“I am working on solving how to improve prescribing and long-term use of medications in chronic diseases and studying whether technology and other tools help improve these issues.” - Dr. Julie Lauffenburger
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Dr. Julie Lauffenburger is an Assistant Professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Julie C. Lauffenburger, PharmD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Her work focuses medication optimization and adherence in chronic diseases, where she has expertise in pragmatic trials, observational study designs, and predictive analytics. Additional areas of interest include developing and evaluating scalable behavioral interventions to improve healthcare delivery, especially using technology and Health IT.
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Dr. Adanna Chukwuma
"The ability to access health care of high quality is sometimes the difference between living and dying. And yet, 172 million people are pushed into poverty from paying for care every year and almost 1 billion poor people are further impoverished from health care costs. My work focuses on supporting governments to address this challenge: how can we improve financial access to high-quality health care, particularly in low-and-middle income countries?” - Dr. Adanna Chukwuma
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Dr. Adanna Chukwuma is a Senior Health Economist in the Health, Nutrition, and Population Global Practice, at the World Bank. Dr. Adanna Chukwuma is a Senior Health Economist in the Health, Nutrition, and Population Global Practice, at the World Bank, where she has led the Bank’s support for the design, implementation, and evaluation of investments in the health sector in Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Romania, and Sierra Leone. Adanna is also an Associate Editor on the Health Systems and Reform Editorial Board, primarily supporting peer-reviewed publications in health financing. She has a medical degree from the University of Nigeria, a Master of Science in Global Health from the University of Oxford, and a Doctor of Science in Health Systems from Harvard University.
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Dr. Kylee Funk
“I am studying how pharmacists providing comprehensive medication management impact the quadruple aim.” - Dr. Kylee Funk
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Dr. Kylee Funk is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. As a clinical faculty member, she provides comprehensive medication management (CMM) in a primary care clinic in Minneapolis. Dr. Funk's research focuses on delivery of CMM and CMM’s impacts on the quadruple aim. Most recently, Dr. Funk's research has looked at how CMM impacts provider work-life. This work builds on prior studies which investigates the effects of teamwork in healthcare on burnout and engagement. When specifically looking at the primary care provider - pharmacist relationship, her team found that primary care providers described pharmacists as improving many aspects of their work-life.
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Dr. David W. Hutton
"I am working to solve questions about efficiently allocating healthcare resources. In particular, I use mathematical models to simulate the overall long-term costs and health effects of new interventions in order to answer these questions." - Dr. David Hutton
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Dr. David Hutton is an Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan. His research is focused on the use of mathematical models to assist with the allocation of resources for health, in particular, evaluating the cost-effectiveness of new medical intervention. He has served as a consultant, advisor, and/or collaborator with the World Health Organization, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Dr. Ankur Pandya
"One out of every six dollars spent in the US is on health care. How do we know if this spending provides good value or if these dollars could have been better spent elsewhere in the health care system or other sectors?" - Dr. Ankur Pandya
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Ankur Pandya, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Health Decision Science in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he teaches introductory health decision science and conducts research based on these methods. His areas of interest are: 1) applied decision science studies evaluating cardiovascular disease policies; 2) connecting cost-effectiveness analysis with broader value-based health policies being implemented or piloted in U.S. health reform; and 3) methodological topics within disease simulation modeling.
Articles shared and written by Dr. Pandya: A Comprehensive Covid-19 Response — The Need for Economic Evaluation (The New England Journal of Medicine) and Responding to Health-Improving but Cost-Ineffective Care (JAMA Health Forum) |
Dr. Brookie Best
"I try to figure out how to safely use needed medications during pregnancy, lactation and childhood. People often need to use medications during pregnancy, breastfeeding and in children. For pregnancy and lactation especially, scientific studies are usually lacking entirely, leaving patients and clinicians to guess (with no evidence) at correct doses, timing and selection of necessary treatments." - Dr. Brookie Best
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Dr. Brookie Best is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacy and Pediatrics at the University of California (UC) San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SSPPS) and the School of Medicine (SOM), Department of Pediatrics - Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. She serves as Dean for SSPPS. Dr. Best specializes in pharmacokinetics – the processes by which a drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized and eliminated by the body. She focuses on perinatal and pediatric clinical pharmacology research, figuring out the right doses of medications to use during pregnancy, lactation and childhood. She completed a Bachelor of Science degree at UC San Diego in Chemistry with an Emphasis in Chemical Education in 1994. She received her Pharm.D. Degree in 1999 from UC San Francisco, and did her residency in Pharmacy Practice at the UC San Diego Medical Center in 2000. Dr. Best was an NICHD/NIH Fellowship recipient in Pediatric Clinical Pharmacology Research from 2001 to 2004, and completed a Masters of Advanced Studies (M.A.S.) in Clinical Research at UC San Diego in 2007.
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Dr. Catherine Duggan
’Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vision of FIP was for a world where everyone had access to safe, effective and affordable medicines…. This vision stands ever stronger and in stark contrast to the inequities we have seen in access to the COVID-19 vaccines and services globally. It is therefore an imperative for me, as CEO of FIP, to ensure that access to services, medicines and care is equitable across communities, ages, abilities, and ethnicities, across regions and the globe and is sustainable in terms of our impact on the environment, our management of waste in medicines and their use and the services we provide. This is not limited to managing COVID-19 and future pandemic, but also to the iceberg of health and care needs the pandemic has exposed.” - Dr. Catherine Duggan
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Dr. Catherine Duggan is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Pharmaceutical Federation and is responsible for visionary leadership, support, development, advocacy and growth across the 150 member organisations and the four million pharmacists and scientists FIP represents. In 2019, Catherine chaired the World Professions Health Alliance (represents 35 million health professionals across medicine, nursing, dentistry, physiotherapy and pharmacy) and signed the FIP MOU with WHO in May 2019 at the World Health Assembly meeting. The MoU builds on the formal established relationship WHO and FIP have held since 1948 and secures how pharmacy contributes globally to Primary Health Care to deliver Universal Health Coverage. Until April 2018, Dr Catherine Duggan was the Director of Professional Development at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. From 2012, Catherine led the development, implementation and strategic embedding of RPS Faculty and Foundation programmes into continuing professional development. Dr. Duggan has published widely and presented at national and international meetings and has a wealth of people and programme management experience. She is a recognised leader across the profession working with many networks within and across the profession and, more widely, health and business. A double graduate from the School of Pharmacy, University of London (now UCL School of Pharmacy, Dr Duggan received a Fellowship of the School of Pharmacy, University of London in 2013 was awarded an honorary Professorship from the School of Pharmacy, University of Nottingham in 2018. She has been awarded Fellowships of both the Royal Pharmaceutical Socity the Royal Society of Arts. In May 2021, Catherine was awarded the Nagai International Woman Scientist Award 2021, on behalf of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Japan.
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Kate Klein
“At the Havey Institute for Global Health, we work to expand knowledge, capacity and equity in global health through transdisciplinary research and education partnerships. I try to find the best ways to connect faculty, residents, and students with collaborators worldwide to collaborate, and, in a sustainable way, work together to tackle problems that disproportionately impact low-and-middle income countries.” - Kate Klein
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Kate Klein serves as the administrative director at the Havey Institute for Global Health. She is responsible for the effective operations of the institute's research and administrative activities as well as the development, oversight and management of international education in clinical medicine and research opportunities for Feinberg School of Medicine students. Kate oversees the integration of all international educational programs for Feinberg and is responsible for developing and maintaining the school’s global educational partnerships. Prior to joining the institute, Klein worked on the Zika virus response at the American Academy of Pediatrics. She also worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Vietnam country office and at headquarters in Atlanta on the Global Health Security Agenda. She also served as the associate director for the Program of African Studies at Northwestern. Kate holds a master's of public health from Northwestern University and a master's degree in anthropology from American University.
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Dr. Jenny Bingham
“The challenge I am working on is how we can support clinicians with readiness tools to prepare for the provision of care via telehealth and digital health.” - Dr. Jenny Bingham
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Dr. Jenny Bingham, PharmD, BCACP, FAzPA, FNAP, serves as Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science at the University of Arizona. Board-certified as an ambulatory care pharmacist with additional training in psychiatric pharmacy, she has led numerous pharmacy practice advancement initiatives. These programs have expanded access to care for vulnerable populations, decreased medication-related problems, improved medication adherence, promoted interprofessional collaboration, and resulted in cost savings for patients. Her research and publications address telehealth, digital health, value-based programs, and comprehensive medication management. Dr. Bingham is recognized for these efforts with awards from local and national organizations, including the Arizona Pharmacy Association’s Exemplary Patient Care Award, Pharmacy Times Next-Generation Pharmacist® Technology Innovator of the Year Award, University of Arizona Jack R. Cole PhD Distinguished Alumnus Award, and the National Academies of Practice Distinguished Practitioner and Fellow of Pharmacy Award.
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Claudia Martinez
“How to incentivize the pharma industry to increase access to medicine for people living in low-and middle-income countries?” - Claudia Martinez
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Claudia Martínez is Research Programme Manager for diabetes and generic medicines, supporting the development of the Foundation's forward-looking research agenda. She has led the development of a first-of-its-kind analytical framework to assess how generic and biosimilar medicine manufacturers are working to improve access to their products in a set of low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) where access gaps are the greatest. She has also undertaken research on the lack of access to insulin and glucose monitoring devices in LMICs, focusing on identifying the role and current actions of leading manufacturers to address these issues and developing concrete policy recommendations. Prior to leading the diabetes and generics programme, Claudia was the Research Manager for the Access to Medicine Index, which evaluates and tracks the efforts of 20 of the largest R&D-based pharmaceutical companies in access to medicine.
During her career, she has held various research and advisory positions across the private and non-profit sectors. Prior to joining the Access to Medicine Foundation, she was Research Manager & Health Policy Lead at a London-based public policy think tank, leading the organisation’s strategy and policy work in health and social care. She was involved in a variety of research projects, ranging from mapping the regulatory pathway for data-driven technologies in healthcare to assessing the United Kingdom’s policy response to Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). She was involved in organising and delivering stakeholder engagement activities by regularly chairing policy roundtables and working with policymakers, civil servants, academics, and private sector partners. Claudia holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Chile and an MSc in Environment, Politics & Globalisation from King’s College London. |
Dr. Katherine Meese
“In its simplest form, healthcare is humans working with humans to heal humans. We must re-humanize healthcare. We have to understand how we can stop breaking our humans, and how we can fix them. Our future depends on it." - Dr. Katherine Meese
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Dr. Katherine A. Meese, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services Administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also serves as the Director of Wellness Research in the UAB Medicine Office of Wellness and Director for the Center for Healthcare Management and Leadership. She earned her Ph.D in Health Services Administration with a specialization in strategic management from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and joined the faculty in 2020. Dr. Meese has several years of industry experience which encompassed work in ten countries on four continents, including management within a large academic medical center. She has co-authored two textbooks for organizational behavior in healthcare that are used in healthcare management programs across the country, as well as numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles. Her research interests are in organizational behavior, leadership, well-being, and delivery models that enhance organizational learning.
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Eden S. Porsangi
“The problem that I am currently trying to solve for is using technology improve employee experience in healthcare. This includes topics such as the challenging work conditions our healthcare workers are at risk of such as mental health problems and the global workforce crisis that is on the horizon.” - Eden S. Porsangi
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Eden Porsangi is a Technical Sales Director at Microsoft where she leads a team of Technical Specialists that helps customers embrace and succeed through digital transformation with the Microsoft Platform. Eden career has seen numerous different roles, and for over twenty years, she has worked with Microsoft’s systems and technologies. Eden is an alumnus of Northwestern University, when she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelors in Organization Behavior, Leadership, and Information Systems. During this time, she became president of the student board and a keynote student speaker at convocation, which allowed her the opportunity to develop her leadership and management skills. She also recently completed the Masters in Microsoft Health program, a rigorous 7-month intensive executive MBA style program tackling key issues, emerging forces of priority, and topics permeating the health and life sciences industry. From this time, she also garnered skills in healthcare, empowerment and guidance, which owe themselves well to her role. Outside of work, Eden enjoys several activities and hobbies, and considers herself a foodie; indeed, she has traveled a long distance to enjoy the most delicious treats and considers this a key personal goal. Moreover, she has a passion for running, and can regularly be found participating in full and half marathons! Furthermore, she is an advocate for women in technology, and has always held a firm passion for supporting more young people to get involved with STEM subjects and careers.
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Announcing more guest speakers soon!