PEOPLE

University of Pennsylvania

Melissa Berkowitz, MPP is a Project Manager in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. She received her Master of Public Policy with a Policy Analysis Specialization from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany and her BA in History from New York University. She has studied and worked in New York City, Accra, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Philadelphia in the fields of international entrepreneurial development, low-income home care, veterans’ care, workers’ rights protection, and international education. Her research interests focus on the socioeconomic impacts of life and health shocks. She is currently working on projects related to the informal care market for older adults, the effects of cognitive training on older adults, and the variation in end of life care.

Steve Boucher is a Senior Research Coordinator in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Steve received his M.S. in Community and Regional Planning from Temple University and his B.A. in Urban Studies from the State University of New York at Albany. Before coming to Penn, he managed research services at the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia. Much of his research has been focused on economic, workforce, and community development, as well as industry market research and competitive intelligence.

Norma B. Coe, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in Economics from MIT and BA in Economics from the College of William & Mary. Dr. Coe is a health economist whose research focuses on identifying causal effects of policies that directly and indirectly impact health, human behavior, health care access, and health care utilization. She has studied healthcare costs, costs to caregivers, the quality of care delivered in an informal vs. formal care setting, the cost-effectiveness of various interventions, and worked with forecasting models. In her research projects, Dr. Coe uses econometric and health services research techniques to answer pressing questions for policymakers about aging in America.

Scott D. Halpern, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and a practicing critical care medicine doctor. He is the founding Director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center, which generates evidence to advance policies and practices that improve the lives of all people affected by serious illness. He is also the founding Director of the Fostering Improvement in End-of-Life Decision Science (FIELDS) program, the nation’s only program that applies behavioral economic principles to understand and improve upon the health decisions made by seriously ill patients, their caregivers, and their clinicians.

Allison Hoffman, JD is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Professor Hoffman is an expert on health care law and policy. She examines some of the most important legal and social issues of our time, including health insurance regulation, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and retiree healthcare expenses, and long-term care. Her research aims to bring greater descriptive and analytical clarity to the purposes of health regulation and to deepen our understanding of how health insurance design and regulation both reflects and shapes social consciousness around risk. Her current work examines the legality and ethics of the adoption of Medicaid work requirements, considers the future of long-term care and end of life care policies and regulation, and critiques how economic theory has overly shaped the development of health law and policy.

Katherine Miller, PhD, MSPH is a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Norma Coe on the project examining the effects of informal care for persons with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. Her dissertation work examined the effects of financial supports for informal caregivers on caregiver health outcomes and employment decisions. Her research focuses on the intersection of aging and health policy evaluation as informed by health economics.

Chuxuan Sun, MPA is a Statistical Analyst in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy. She has a Master of Public Administration with a special focus on quantitative policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research projects are focused on estimating the effectiveness of the last 20 years of health system reforms that align financial incentives and encourage care coordination on End-of-Life care received in the United States.

Rachel Werner, MD, PhD is Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine as well as the Robert D. Eilers Professor of Health Care Management at the Wharton School. She is the Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and a practicing physician at the Philadelphia VA. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Werner has built a foundational research program examining the effects of health care policies on health care delivery, using methods designed to draw causal inference from observational data. She has investigated the unintended consequences of quality improvement incentives, and was among the first to recognize that public reporting of quality information may worsen racial disparities. Dr. Werner now serves on Pennsylvania’s Nursing Home Quality Improvement Task Force. She is a Core Investigator with the VA HSR&D Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion (CHERP), and directs one of four national centers to evaluate the effectiveness of the VA’s medical home.

University of Washington

Nita Khandelwal, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is board certified in both anesthesiology and critical care medicine. She is a practicing critical care medicine physician in the trauma, surgical and neurosciences intensive care units at Harborview Medical Center. Dr. Khandelwal is a core investigator with the Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence at UW with funding from both the NIH and AHRQ. Her research focuses on the intersection between health economics and the delivery of palliative and end of life care in the intensive care unit for patients with serious and chronic illness and their family members.

RTI International

Lindsay White

Oregon Health and Science University

Joan M. Teno, MS, MD is a physician health services researcher with over 25 years of experience conducting research that has impacted and transformed end of life care in the US. She is a board certified internist with added qualifications in geriatrics, hospice, and palliative medicine. Dr. Teno was a hospice medical director for 18 years. Over the past decade, she has been the PI of two National Institute on Aging (NIA) grants working with Drs. Mor, Mitchell, and Gozalo that provided the authoritative evidence base of the effectiveness of percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) feeding tube in persons with advance dementia. In recognition of this body of work, Dr. Teno was part of the study panel of the 2014 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on reforming how we care for seriously ill and dying persons in America. In 2018, Dr. Teno was named one of the visionaries in hospice and palliative care. Throughout Dr. Teno’s career, she has been one of the leaders in defining and operationalizing how we measure the quality of care for those who are dying through bereaved family member surveys and use of administrative data. She is currently the project leader of a program project grant studying attending physician staff for persons with multimorbidity.