Alpert Medical School Presents The 2009-2010
Paul Levinger Health Care Reform Roundtable Series

Health Care Reform: What are the politics?

Monday, November 30, 2009
3-4:30pm
Andrews Hall
211 Bowen Street, Providence
to the public.

Patrick Kennedy
Congressman, First District of Rhode Island

Edward Wing, MD
Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences

Vincent Mor, PhD
Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Health

A reception will immediately follow the lecture. Both are free and open to the public.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

Upon the conclusion of this forum, attendees will be able to interpret health care reform options related to goals of improving quality of care, sharing of information through electronic medical records and improving patient health outcomes.

CME ACCREDITATION

The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

CREDIT DESIGNATION

Alpert Medical School designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

ABOUT THE LECTURESHIP

Support for this series is provided by the Paul Levinger Professorship Pro Tem in the Economics of Health Care, which was endowed in 1987 to honor the memory of Paul Levinger by his wife, the late Ruth Levinger, and his daughter and son-in-law, Bette Levinger Cohen and John M. Cohen, MD ’59.

Patrick Kennedy
Patrick J. Kennedy is serving his eighth term in Congress as the representative from the First District of Rhode Island. 

Kennedy was appointed to the House Appropriations Committee in December 1998, but requested a leave of absence in order to fulfill a two-year term as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.  With the term completed, Kennedy now sits on the powerful panel which has authority over all of the federal government’s discretionary spending.  As part of his Appropriations duties, Kennedy sits on the Subcommittees on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; and on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs. He is also a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

As nearly one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the largest employer in Rhode Island, a major cost to businesses, and a basic human right, health care has been one of Kennedy’s top priorities.  He  has spoken out strongly in support of adding a comprehensive prescription drug benefit plan to the Medicare program and has introduced a bill to reduce drug costs.  He has fought Republican attempts to privatize Medicare and push Seniors into private drug plans. Kennedy has been a vocal proponent of health care reform, including calling for universal coverage and re-orienting the system towards preventive care.  He has led Congress in efforts to reduce asthma and improve asthma care for children, including co-sponsorship of the Asthmatic Schoolchildren's Treatment and Health Management Act of 2003.  He also has been particularly active in the effort to conquer lymphoma and leukemia and was named the recipient of the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s Paul E. Tsongas Memorial Award as well as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation Congressional Honors Award. In 2003, Kennedy also introduced HR 3359, the Prevention, Awareness, and Research of Auto-Immune Diseases Act aimed at improving research and outreach for the estimated 14 to 22 million people affected by autoimmune diseases, most of whom are women.

More information at: http://www.patrickkennedy.house.gov/singlepage.aspx?NewsID=1254

Edward Wing, MD
Raised in Port Washington, NY, Dr. Wing graduated magna cum laude from Williams College in 1966 with a BA in chemistry. He earned his MD in 1971 from Harvard Medical School, and went on to complete his internship and residency at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and an infectious disease fellowship at Stanford University. In 1977, he began his career in academic medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served variously as physician-in-chief at Montefiore Hospital, chief of infectious diseases, and interim chief of medicine before coming to Brown to 1998.
Prior to his appointment as dean of medicine and biological sciences in July 2008, Dr. Wing had for ten years served as chair of Brown’s Department of Medicine and the Joukowsky Family Professor of Medicine. As chair, Dr. Wing consolidated divisions and training programs, quadrupled external research funding, and strengthened clinical services. He also established thriving international programs, including a partnership with Moi University in Kenya, through which 30,000 people living with AIDS currently receive antiretroviral treatment. His strong interest in international health has also led him to oversee programs in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, India, Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Russia; these programs currently provide direct care to hundreds of patients and offer outstanding educational opportunities for Brown undergraduates, medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty.
A specialist in infectious diseases, Dr. Wing has been author or co-author of more than ninety
peer-reviewed articles and eighteen book chapters. His NIH-funded research interests have focused on the immune host defenses against intracellular pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes and agents of bio-terrorism.

Vincent Mor, PhD
Dr. Vincent Mor is Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Health at the Brown University School of Medicine and formerly served as the Director of the Brown University Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research. Dr. Mor has been on the faculty of the Department of Community Health since 1981, becoming tenured in 1987. Dr. Mor was one of the founders of the Department's graduate program in 1986 and directed it until becoming chair in 1996.
Dr. Mor has been Principal Investigator of over 20 NIH funded grants focusing on the organizational and health care delivery system factors associated with variation in use of health services and the outcomes frail and chronically ill persons experience. He has had multiple grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Pew Memorial Trust and the Retirement Research Foundation as well as contracts from the Health Care Financing Administration and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation to evaluate the impact of programs and policies in aging and long term care including Medicare funding of hospice, the costs and benefits of day hospital treatment of cancer, patient outcomes in nursing homes, the impact of short term case management for cancer patients, several studies documenting age discrimination in cancer treatment and use of home care services, and a national study of residential care facilities. Over the past 20 years Dr. Mor's research has frequently integrated quantitative and qualitative data, particularly in program evaluations examining the approaches communities, organizations and specific providers use to adjust to health policy changes such as financing and reimbursement or to the emergence of integrated delivery systems.
Dr. Mor was one of the authors of the Congressionally mandated Minimum Data Set (MDS) for Nursing Home Resident Assessment and evaluated its implementation, focusing particularly on the manner it was implemented. Dr. Mor has developed several summary measures based upon MDS data to characterize residents' physical, cognitive and psycho-social functioning, all of which have been used in resident and facility level analyses of the quality of nursing home care in US and international populations. Recently, Dr. Mor directed the Brown University component of a contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly HCFA) to develop and validate risk adjusted quality indicators for nursing homes that are currently being tested for public reporting throughout the country.
He held a MERIT award from NIA for his research on nursing home organizational factors related to facility quality and residents' outcomes for 10 years and was a recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Investigator award to examine the influence of managed care and integrated delivery systems on the strategic decisions of nursing homes and their quality consequences for residents. He examined the effect of state policies on the quality of care provided nursing home residents, including hospitalization, merging primary and secondary data from all nursing facilities throughout the United States. Dr. Mor was recently funded by the NIA for a period of five years to undertake a large Program Project Grant, "Shaping Long Term Care in America". This program involves 3 research and administration cores and 4 separate projects all of which seek to better understand the impact of changing state Medicaid policies on long term care providers and the patients that they serve.
Dr. Mor was a member of the Secretary of HHS's National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and the recently completed Institute of Medicine Committee on Long Term Care Quality. He is a member of the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Health Services Research for the Department of Veteran Affairs. He has published over 200 peer reviewed articles and numerous books and book chapters on hospice, physical functioning, long term care and cancer treatment patterns among the elderly as well as the organization of AIDS health services. Dr. Mor has published widely on the measurement of quality of life and physical functioning in various chronically ill populations using both previously standardized as well as novel measures of functioning. He has published models pertaining to the measurement of quality in long term care facilities and lectures widely on this topic. He is on editorial boards including Health Services Research.