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Keynote and Plenary Speakers

Keynote Speaker 1

Gail R. Wilensky is an economist and senior fellow at Project HOPE, an international health foundation. She has directed Medicare and Medicaid programs and served in the White House as a senior advisor on health and welfare issues to President George H. W. Bush. She also was the first chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Wilensky currently serves as a trustee of the Combined Benefits Fund of the United Mine Workers of America and the National Opinion Research Center and is on the Board of Regents of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Medical School, and the board of directors of the Geisinger Health System Foundation.

An elected member of the Institute of Medicine, Wilensky has served two terms on its governing council, chairs the Healthcare Servicing Board, and recently co-chaired its Committee on Finance and Governance of Graduate Medical Education. She testifies before congressional committees and speaks nationally and internationally.

Keynote Speaker 2

Marc L. Berger is Vice President of Real World Data and Analytics at Pfizer Inc. He has held senior-level positions in industry, including executive vice president and senior scientist at OptumInsight; vice president, Global Health Outcomes at Eli Lilly and Company; and vice president, Outcomes Research and Management at Merck & Co., Inc.

Berger also has served on the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the steering committee for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Centers for Research and Education on Therapeutics, the board of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, and the editorial advisory board of Value in Health. Currently, he serves as chair of the Innovative Technology Advocacy Committee of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and is a member of the Advisory Council for North America of the Drug Information Association.

Berger has written or co-written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and other publications on a range of topics, including health services research, outcomes research, health economics, and health policy. He co-edited Health Care, Cost, Quality, and Outcomes - ISPOR Book of Terms, which was published in 2003 and subsequently translated into nine languages.

Plenary Speaker

Constantine A. Gatsonis is the Henry Ledyard Goddard University Professor, founding director of the Center for Statistical Sciences, and founding chair of the department of biostatistics at Brown University. He is a leading author on the evaluation of diagnostic and screening tests and has made major contributions to the development of methods for medical technology assessment and health services and outcomes research. He is a world leader in methods for applying and synthesizing evidence on diagnostic tests in medicine and currently works on comparative effectiveness research in diagnosis and prediction.

Gatsonis has long-term involvement in the development of Bayesian statistical methods for problems in biomedical research. He developed and applied hierarchical regression models to the analysis variations in utilization, outcomes, and quality of health care; meta-analysis of diagnostic test accuracy studies; and the variability in diagnostic performance among radiologists and institutions. He also has worked extensively in clinical trials of diagnostic and imaging modalities for cancer and other chronic diseases.

Gatsonis currently chairs the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academies and is a member of the Committee on National Statistics and the Committee to Evaluate the Department of Veterans Affairs Mental Health Services. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and Association for Health Services Research.