Commission Members

Paul B. Ginsburg, Ph.D., is the Leonard Schaeffer Chair in Health Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and professor of health policy at the University of Southern California, where he is affiliated with the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. He directs the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. Prior positions include founder and president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, founding executive director of the Physician Payment Review Commission, senior economist at RAND, and deputy assistant director at the Congressional Budget Office. Dr. Ginsburg earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard University.
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Lawrence Casalino, M.D., Ph.D., is the Livingston Farrand Professor of Public Health and chief of the Division of Health Policy and Economics in the Weill Cornell Medical School Department of Population Health Sciences. His research focuses on the intended and unintended effects of public and private policies on the types of provider organizations that exist, on the processes they use to provide care, and on the quality and cost of care, as well as the impact of policies and organizational processes on socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities. Dr. Casalino has served as a senior advisor to the director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and as chair of the AcademyHealth annual meeting. He currently serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisors. He was a primary care physician in private practice for 20 years. He received his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco, and his Ph.D. in health services research from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stacie B. Dusetzina, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an Ingram Associate Professor of Cancer Research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN. She has conducted extensive research on topics related to Medicare coverage for prescription drugs, including studies focusing on drug pricing, Medicare Part D benefit design, and Medicare formulary coverage polices. Dr. Dusetzina has served as a committee member for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on the topic “Ensuring Patient Access to Affordable Drug Therapies” and as an expert witness for the Senate Special Committee on Aging.  She received her PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from the Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and post-doctoral training in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

David Grabowski, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. His research primarily focuses on the economics of aging, with an emphasis on post-acute and long-term care financing, organization, and delivery of services. He has published over 175 peer-reviewed papers related to these issues. Dr. Grabowski has served as a member of multiple CMS technical expert panels related to post-acute care payment and quality reporting. He also was a member of the CMS Coronavirus Nursing Home Commission. He serves on the editorial board of several journals, including the American Journal of Health Economics. Dr. Grabowski received his Ph.D. in public policy from the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Amol Navathe, M.D., Ph.D., is director of the Payment Insights Team, codirector of the Healthcare Transformation Institute, and associate director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. He is also an assistant professor at Penn and staff physician at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Navathe’s research group designs, tests, and evaluates payment models for national insurers and state Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. His work led to the founding of Embedded Healthcare, a health care technology company that accelerates high-value practice using behavioral economics. Dr. Navathe received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in health care management and economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bruce Pyenson, F.S.A., M.A.A.A., is principal and consulting actuary at Milliman Inc. in New York, NY. His recent work includes studies on Medicare Advantage enrollment, innovative reinsurance arrangements, definitions of value in health care, and financial modeling of therapeutic interventions. He has co-authored publications on such topics as the cost-effectiveness of lung cancer screening, pandemic influenza, alternative payment models for accountable care organizations, and site-of-service cost differences for chemotherapy. Mr. Pyenson is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He is adjunct clinical associate professor of New York University’s College of Global Public Health.

Wayne J. Riley, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., is president of the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Health Sciences University, tenured professor of internal medicine and of health policy & management and the Chair of the Board of the New York Academy of Medicine. Immediately prior to joining Downstate, Dr. Riley served as clinical professor of medicine and adjunct professor of healthcare management at Vanderbilt University. He was the also 10th president and chief executive officer of Meharry Medical College. He began his career at Baylor College of Medicine, where he completed residency training in internal medicine and held several key administrative posts including Vice President and Vice Dean for Health Affairs and Governmental Relations, Assistant Dean for Education, and Assistant Chief of Medicine at Ben Taub General Hospital––a leading public safety net teaching hospital. Dr. Riley is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, where he served as vice chair and chair of the NAM Section on the Administration of Health Services, Education and Research. He is also president emeritus of the American College of Physicians––the nation’s largest medical specialty society representing internal medicine and the president of the Society of Medical Administrators––an organization of fifty of the nation’s leading physician-executives. He is an independent director of HCA Healthcare, Inc. and of Compass Pathways, plc. Dr. Riley earned a B.A. in anthropology from Yale University, an M.P.H. in health systems management from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the M.D. from Morehouse School of Medicine, and an M.B.A. from Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.

Dana Gelb Safran, Sc.D., is senior vice president, Value Based Care and Population Health at Well Health Inc., a communications platform enabling dynamic, personalized communications between patients and their providers and plans. She leads the expansion of the platform’s uses to improve health care outcomes and affordability through partnerships with payers and accountable care organization providers, and she is establishing an enterprise-wide measurement function to quantify customer results and inform continuous improvement and best-practice sharing. Previously, Dr. Safran was a founding executive team member at Haven, the joint venture of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase. At Haven, Dr. Safran was head of measurement and head of insurance markets and benefit redesign. Before joining Haven, Dr. Safran was chief performance measurement and improvement officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA). As an architect of the BCBSMA Alternative Quality Contract and the leader responsible for its unique use of behavioral economics and payer–provider collaboration to reduce cost while improving quality, Dr. Safran is widely recognized as having contributed to the national push toward value-based payment. Before joining BCBSMA, she led a research institute at Tufts University School of Medicine dedicated to developing patient-reported measures of health and health care quality. She remains on the faculty at Tufts and serves on a number of state and national advisory bodies related to health care quality and affordability. She earned her master’s and doctor of science degrees from the Harvard School of Public Health.