Judges

In his role as the Vice President of Provider Networks and Performance at AIM Specialty Health, Kevin provides overall management and coordination of AIM’s enterprise provider networks nationally, including contracting, credentialing, provider relations and provider data management. Kevin joined AIM in 2004.

Kevin has over 25 years of experience in the managed care and healthcare industry. His expertise lies with knowledge of product development and management, consumer engagement, payer systems, payer operations, benefit administration. EMR workflow integration, and provider networks. Previous roles included stints at Ernst & Young, United Healthcare, and University of Michigan Medical Center.

Kevin earned his Master’s degree in Health Services Administration from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.

Integrity and equity—two words that inspire Amanda Menzies. As a vice president, she works with clients to develop and implement policies to ensure all Michiganders have access to physical and behavioral healthcare services. Amanda is currently supporting the development of a statewide continuum of behavioral health crisis services, evaluating programs to expand access to breakfast in schools, and conducting research on access to post-acute brain injury treatment. Amanda often facilitates large- and small-group discussions to find consensus on tough policy issues. When she’s not working with clients to ensure policy decisions are informed by both data and humanity, you can find her in the football stands watching her sons play in their high school and college marching bands.

Lia is a Director of Health Policy at the Illinois Health and Hospital Association (IHA), a trade association advocating for Illinois' more than 200 hospitals and nearly 40 health systems. She currently provides leadership on a range of healthcare policy and reimbursement issues at IHA, including behavioral health service delivery and workforce needs, telehealth and other emerging healthcare topics. Serving in IHA’s policy division since 2014, Lia also provides oversight of a hospital behavioral health leadership forum and statewide constituency section. Previously, she worked as an analyst at the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design, in accreditation at the Medical University of South Carolina, and in government roles focusing on project management, federal healthcare program analysis and public health-focused disaster relief. Lia has a Master’s degree in Public Health focusing on Health Management & Policy and a Certificate in Risk Science and Human Health from the University of Michigan. She has a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology and Psychology from the College of Charleston. From 2015 to 2020, Lia served on the Board of Directors at the National Alliance for Mental Illness, Metro-Suburban Chapter in Oak Park, Illinois.

Terrisca Des Jardins is a seasoned, award-winning and nationally recognized executive, with nearly 30 years of experience in health care. She has served non-profits, for-profits, government and philanthropic entities, as well as payers, purchasers, providers, consumers, universities, and cross-sector partnerships, among others. As a strategic and compassionate leader, she advances organizations, innovative initiatives, and scalable programs to better individual, community, and population health. Des Jardins is executive director of the Center for Health and Research Transformation (CHRT) at the University of Michigan. She leads CHRT’s vision, strategy, advancement, and operations.

Prior to joining CHRT in 2020, Des Jardins was chief operating officer of the Physician Organization of Michigan Accountable Care Organization (POM ACO), a Medicare Shared Savings Program ACO with 4,500 Michigan providers and 50,000 Medicare enrollees. In this role, Des Jardins facilitated a comprehensive organizational overhaul and strategic planning process, launched the ACO’s learning health system and a nationally-recognized Medicare enrollee advisory committee. She helped to save tens of millions of dollars for the federal government, taxpayers, and the ACO, while significantly improving the quality of care for the ACO’s Medicare enrollees.

As director of the Southeast Michigan Beacon Community initiative from 2011–2013, Des Jardins led a series of pilot studies—funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—to advance population health and diminish health and health care disparities by addressing the social determinants of health, incorporating community health workers into care teams, leveraging health information technologies, and recommending other strategies. Des Jardins has also held significant leadership positions with United Physicians, Ingenium, the Greater Detroit Area Health Council, the Southeast Michigan Partners Project, and Health Management Associates. Her contributions have been recognized by the United States Surgeon General, the National Kidney Foundation, the National Partnership for Immunization, the Michigan Health Information Technology Commission, and Crain’s Detroit Business (40 under 40 and Notable Women in Health Care 2020). Des Jardins received a master’s degree in health services administration from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Tom Buchmueller is a health economist who is an expert on the economics of health insurance and related public policies. He has done extensive research on the link between health insurance and the labor market in the U.S., consumer demand for health insurance, the interaction between public policies and private insurance markets, and health care reform. In addition to his research on U.S. policy topics, he has published studies on the economics of health insurance in France, Australia and the Netherlands. Much of his recent research focuses on health care reform in the U.S., with a particular emphasis on the effect of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage expansions on patients and provider organizations.

Professor Buchmueller also holds an appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health and is on the Institutional Leadership Team of the University’s Institute of Health Policy and Innovation. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists. In 2011-12, he served as the Senior Health Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Prior to joining the Ross School in 2006, Buchmueller was a Professor at the University of California-Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business. Other prior academic appointments include: Professeur Invité at the University of Bordeaux (2015-16), Packer Policy Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Health Economic Research and Evaluation (2006-2007), Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2005-2006), and Visiting Research Scholar at INSEAD (2001-02).

Matt Jirsa is the current Administrative Fellow at UC San Diego Health. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Society at Cornell University and his Master of Health Services Administration from the University of Michigan.

In undergraduate, Matt was heavily involved in healthcare quality and process improvement efforts at his campus health center, Cornell Health. He founded and led a Mental Health Task Force to implement structural and policy changes to increase access to care and provider capacity. Additionally, Matt interned with Stanford Healthcare in the Employee and Labor Relations Department where he worked on auditing HR policies, analyzing severance and labor contracts, and resolving employee disputes. These experiences solidified his path towards becoming a servant leader in healthcare with the goal of enhancing “holistic” care delivery and expanding access to care.

At Michigan, Matt was the Professional Development Chair of the Health Policy Student Association, founder of the Health Policy Case Competition, and an International Healthcare Volunteer for the William Davidson Institute. Matt completed his summer internship at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Endocrine Division where he worked to analyze patient volumes to improve follow-up care delivery and Joint Commission benchmarking during the COVID-19 pandemic. This internship eventually led to a position as an Administrative Coordinator, where he got the chance to recruit and organize the Administrative Internship Program and work on health equity initiatives to reconcile and eliminate structural racism across the hospital.

Matt has strong interest in operations and clinic management in the areas of primary care, behavioral health/psychiatry, and cardiovascular care. He looks forward to contributing to a variety of strategic initiatives across his career.

Bill thrives on solving meaningful problems with data and teamwork.

With 10 years of experience in healthcare, Bill has crafted Value-based Care strategies from EHR/claims data, optimized hospital supply chains, implemented technology tools and led medical group operations. He leverages his engineering training and industry knowledge to build sustainable and efficient processes. Bill is also enthusiastic about growing diverse teams, where everyone is a leader in their own way.

Prior to joining Incredible Health, Bill was leading 13 clinical departments with a team of 250+ employees at Kaiser Permanente. He received two master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and Healthcare Management from University of Michigan. He is a competitive rower, avid cyclist, and self-proclaimed foodie.

Jaye Clement is the Director of Community Health Programs and Strategies with the Office of Community Health, Equity and Wellness at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. She is responsible for aligning the System's commitment to its communities by engaging new and existing partners around issues of community health and managing metrics and data sets to continuously improve strategies that contribute to engagement and community health improvement strategies. She serves as a healthcare advocate and liaison to external audiences, including community, civic and faith-based organizations, volunteers and other key publics. Besides working to align the HFHS Community Health Needs Assessment and the corresponding Implementation Plans for each of its 5 hospitals, Jaye also staffs the Detroit Regional Infant Mortality Reduction Task Force and holds administrative oversight for their nationally-recognized and award-winning Women-Inspired Neighborhood Network: Detroit program. Jaye helps staff the health system’s community health steering committee, Community Health ANchor Council Enterprise-wide (CHANCE). CHANCE aims to improve social and environmental factors affecting the health of our communities with an ultimate goals of reducing unnecessary care, cost and suffering, and promoting equity, community well-being and sustainability as core principles of healthy communities. Jaye also directs the Community Health Worker Hub for the health system, which is responsible for the integration and deployment of CHWs throughout the System for the purpose of promoting a culture of wellness through enhanced care coordination that simultaneously addresses clinical factors and social determinants of health, ensuring CHWs are a valued part of the healthcare workforce, and taking a population-based approach to extend care beyond hospital walls.

Jaye earned her MPH in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and her MPP from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, both in 2005. Her experiences range from working in major health systems, nonprofits and local government as her career is dedicated to community health, advocacy and the pursuit of health equity. In 2017, she completed a three-year fellowship in the inaugural class of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network. She also serves as chairperson on the board of directors for the Michigan Community Health Worker Alliance, is an advisory board member for Black Mothers’ Breastfeeding Association and was recently elected as the first public member of the American College of Nurse Midwives’ board of directors. Jaye is a mother of two boys, wife and life-long Detroiter.

Ms. Wong is currently a doctoral student at Thomas Jefferson University in Population Health and a graduate assistant at the 1889 Jefferson Center for Population Health. She became interested in healthcare when, as a student volunteer at UCLA, her professor was quickly recruited to work in the Clinton Healthcare Task Force in the mid-1990s. This theme of change continued during the start of her administrative fellowship, which occurred the same day the insurance market was deregulated in New York State. As a result, Ms. Wong learned early to study policy changes and their impacts on operations and patients. She also gained an appreciation for collaborating with multi-functional stakeholders to get projects completed and become sustainable.

In her career Ms. Wong has worked in healthcare operations (in a federally qualified health center, a Hill-Burton hospital in rural Michigan, a stand-alone hospital in Brooklyn, NY, and multiple large health systems), the corporate offices of a health system, a managed-care plan, and a hospital association. Her portfolio has encompassed finance analysis and reporting, projects (IT and federal-level regulatory), analytics, capital and business planning, managed care operations, hospital operations, and community relations and advocacy.

Sh completed two master’s programs – one at the beginning of her career from the University of Michigan in Health Services Administration and a recent one from Johns Hopkins University in Population Health Management. She advocates for continuing healthcare education through her volunteer work at the Great Lakes and Northeast Ohio Chapters of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). Recently, she was honored to serve as an advisor and consultant for CovidSMS, a start-up connecting non-profits to their client base via SMS text messaging during the pandemic, that won the Robert Wood Johnson Emergency Response for the General Public Innovation Challenge and was part of their participation in the Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures’ (JHTV) Social Innovation Lab 2020-21 cohort.

Rose Duhan is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Community Health Care Association of New York State (CHCANYS). CHCANYS represents New York’s 70 community health centers that provide primary, dental and behavioral health care services in otherwise medically underserved communities. New York State community health centers serve over two million patients annually, 90% of whom are low-income, and 60% are black or Latinx. She is responsible for providing strategic vision and leadership to the organization, working with the Board of Directors in crafting CHCANYS mission, vision, and goals and executing strategies to achieve those goals.

Ms. Duhan has worked extensively on health care policy in New York State inside and outside of government at both the state and local levels. Prior to CHCANYS, she served as the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health in the Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, where she assisted with development and implementation of the Governor’s health and behavioral health agenda. At the local government level, she worked for Albany County in the Department of Management and Budget, designing and implementing long term care system reform. Ms. Duhan’s experience also includes statewide policy development and advocacy for the New York Health Plan Association (HPA) and the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS).

Yaqoota Aziz is a Senior Strategy Consultant at Health Care Service Corporation (BCBS of IL, MT, NM, OK, TX), specializing in developing growth strategies and revenue diversification opportunities. Prior to HCSC, she worked in strategy at BCBS of Michigan and was an administrative fellow at Beaumont Health. She completed her MHSA from the University of Michigan and her BS in Public Health from the University of Illinois. In her free time, she volunteers with and serves on the Associate Boards of Girl Scouts and Tutoring Chicago - both organizations focus on enabling children's success academically and by developing them as future leaders.

Kristen Lunde serves as Health Policy Advisor for the United States Senate Committee on Finance under Chairman Ron Wyden. In this role, her portfolio includes Medicare Part A. She also leads efforts relating to the health care workforce, rural health, and innovative payment and service delivery models. Prior to joining the committee as professional staff, Kristen was a David A. Winston Health Policy Fellow. She has previously held positions in health care policy advocacy, operations, and research. Kristen received a Master of Public Health in Health Management and Policy from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Malika Fair, MD, MPH is the Senior Director of Equity and Social Accountability at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Dr. Fair develops programs and initiatives with multidisciplinary partners and local communities to advance equity, racial justice, population health, and accountability in academic medicine. She is also an Associate Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Fair completed her residency training and chief residency at Carolinas Medical Center, received her medical and Master of Public Health degrees from the University of Michigan, and Bachelor of Science from Stanford University.

Alyssa Mouton is Health Equity Leadership Awakened Fellow (Human Impact Partners, 2018-2019) who is committed to applying a health equity lens to policies and programs. She holds both a Master of Public Health and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Social Policy from Michigan State University.

Previously, she served as a Health Extension Agent with the U.S. Peace Corps in Mali from 2008-2010. With the University of Michigan Health System, she was a Program Manager for the 1000+ OBGYN Project to train and retain womens' health specialists in Sub-saharan Africa. She also worked with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services as a Tobacco-free Policy and Health Equity Strategist to support the development of comprehensive and equitable tobacco policies across the state.

She is currently a Senior Manager, Tobacco Control Advocacy with Vital Strategies in N.Y.C. and provides technical support and policy advocacy guidance to teams in ten countries. She also consults with the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council as a Special Projects Manager in support of their mission to protect the Black community from tobacco industry exploitation.

Deeba is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Rheumatology who actively sees patient, and is researcher studying precision medicine, especially non-pharmacologic approaches such as Mindfulness-Based Stress

Reduction (MBSR) to pain and fatigue management in patients.

As a member of the De An IMPOWER Council was created (IMPOWER - Inspiring Medicine to Promote Opportunities for Well-Being, Equity, and Diversity) she works to facilitate multidirectional communication and

support initiatives to drive culture change around IMPOWER’s four strategic priorities: develop people, improve the environment, build partnerships, and communicate results.

She is also a member of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) — and has been able to explore salient epidemiologic topics in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), including opiate use, health disparities and access to care.

She graduated from University of Pittsburgh Medical School and did a rheumatology fellowship at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Leslie is senior vice president of strategy for Vizient and leads the development and activation of corporate strategy with a focus on market research, growth and revenue diversification, and enterprise strategic planning.

Prior to joining Vizient in 2021, Leslie built and launched a home health management business for naviHealth, an industry leading, technology-enabled, care management company focused on helping seniors navigate the complex post-acute care ecosystem. In addition to taking the business from concept to successful launch where the product served more than 300k Medicare Advantage members, Leslie was also responsible for day-to-day operations, product management, and sales, ultimately securing new client commitments that would extend the reach of the product to more than 2M patients.

Leslie also led corporate strategy functions at Health Care Service Corporation, the largest member-owned health insurer in the US, and Spectrum Health, a large integrated delivery network serving more than 2.5 million patients across the state of Michigan. During her tenure leading the strategy team at Spectrum Health, Leslie reorganized and retooled the function to pivot from supporting traditional planning activities to driving corporate strategy development and growth and helped architect a new strategic direction for the company focusing on consumer-centric care delivery and revenue diversification. Leslie also led operations for the digestive health and post-acute clinical service lines at Spectrum Health Medical Group where she had accountability for a broad range of clinical programs from home-based primary care to inpatient surgical services. Before Spectrum Health, Leslie worked for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, where she was the administrator of several community safety-net programs including the AIDS Drug Assistance Program and a high-risk insurance premium subsidy program.

Leslie earned her bachelor’s degree in Human Physiology from Michigan State University and a master’s in health services administration from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.