About Us
The HealthWell Foundation® is a
501(c)(3)
non-profit organization established in 2003 to address the needs of individuals
who cannot afford their insurance copayments, premiums,
coinsurance, or other out-of-pocket health care costs.
The Foundation’s independent Board of Directors makes all decisions regarding program criteria and financial awards, and oversees the organization’s operations.
Board of Directors
- Stephen M. Weiner,
President
- Jerri Scarzella, BSN,
Vice President and Chief Financial Officer/Treasurer
- Nancy Carteron, MD, FACR, Vice President and Secretary
- David L. Knowlton,
Board Member
- Don Liss, MD,
Board Member
- Suzanne M. Miller, Ph.D., Board Member
-
Jeffrey Peppercorn, MD, MPH,
Chief Ethics Advisor
Stephen M. Weiner
President
Steve Weiner is a member in and serves as chairman of the
Health Care Section of Mintz Levin. He has had over 30
years of experience in the health care field as a policy
maker, educator and attorney. In his practice, he provides
a broad array of legal services for a wide variety of providers
of health care services, with particular emphasis on strategic
positioning; developing integrated delivery systems and
risk-bearing provider relationships; structuring (and restructuring,
as needed) risk arrangements, both among providers and
with managed care organizations; representing provider
in mergers, acquisitions, strategic affiliations, "demergers," transactions
of other types, and genera contracting; representing academic
medical centers in a variety of issues, including clinical
research, conflict of interest, relationships with affiliated
medical schools and relationships with federally qualified
community health centers; designing and structuring hospital/physician
relationships; negotiating managed care contracts; representing
providers on reimbursement, licensure and certificate of
need matters and in managed care receiverships and liquidations;
and counseling in the arena of fraud and abuse, especially
to minimize exposure in the structuring of transactions.
Steve has served as the chairman of the Massachusetts Rate Setting Commission,
special assistant to the Governor of Massachusetts for health policy, Associate
Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law, Director of the Boston University
Center for Law and Health Sciences, and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School
and Boston University School of Law. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of
Law at Suffolk University School of Law, where he teaches a course on corporate
transactions in health care. He lectures regularly on health care issues and
is often quoted in the media on current developments and trends in the health
care field.
He has been a member of the boards of the Beth Israel Hospital of Boston and
Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, an incorporator of Massachusetts General Hospital
and of Partners HealthCare System, Inc., a Director of the Massachusetts AIDS
Action Committee and of the Massachusetts Chapter of the HealthCare Financial
Managers Association, and a member of the House of Delegates of the Massachusetts
Easter Seal Society. Steve is a member of the Board of Trustees and Treasurer
of The Boston Ballet, and a member of the boards of The Huntington Theatre Company
in Boston, and of the New England Conservatory Lab Charter School Foundation,
the last being a support organization to a charter school developed in conjunction
with the New England Conservatory of Music. He is also an Overseer of the Boston
Lyric Opera. Steve has been listed in the health law section of The Best
Lawyers in America since the section originated, and is listed in Who's
Who in America.
Steve is a graduate of Harvard College, magna cum laude,
and of Yale Law School.
Jerri Scarzella, BSN
Vice President and Chief Financial Officer/Treasurer
Jerri Scarzella is a graduate of the
American University School of Nursing in Washington, D.C.
She is a Customer Relations Practitioner at Holy Cross
Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. Jerri has worked at
Holy Cross for about 30 years, in both clinical and managerial
positions. Currently Jerri is the customer service educator
for the hospital. Jerri has served as the President of
both the Potomac Chapter and the National Society for Healthcare
Consumer Advocacy. She currently serves on the Board of
The HealthWell Foundation as Vice President and CFO. Jerri
speaks on a variety of topics both nationally and internationally . For
the past two years, Jerri has also worked with the Washington
D.C. Public School System as an educator for principals
and teachers.
Nancy Carteron, MD, FACR
Vice President and Secretary
Nancy Carteron is a Fellow
of the American College of Rheumatology and board certified
in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology. She maintains
a consultative private practice specializing in autoimmune
disease at the California Pacific Medical Center in
San Francisco. She also serves on the Clinical Faculty
at the University of California San Francisco, guiding
young physicians in their Arthritis Center. Her research
in Immunology, Molecular Virology, and Cellular Immunology
at the Johns Hopkins and University of California San Francisco
Medical Centers has appeared in numerous medical journals
and publications. She has also participated as a Clinical
Investigator in numerous studies of new biologic agents
for autoimmune disease, and published a review article, "Cytokines
in rheumatoid arthritis: trials and tribulations" in Molecular
Medicine Today. She recently co-authored a book entitled "A
Body Out of Balance: Understanding and Treating Sjogren's
Syndrome," about one of over 80 autoimmune diseases.
David L. Knowlton
Board Member
David Knowlton is President and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute,
the Founder and Director of the Health Care Payers Coalition of New Jersey, and a Principal of Knowlton and
Associates, Consultants. Prior to these positions, Mr. Knowlton was a Vice President of the MIIX Group, and
Deputy Commissioner of the New Jersey State Department of Health. Mr. Knowlton also serves as an adjunct
faculty member at both Rutgers University and the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. He also has served as
the Director of the LeapFrog Group, Washington, DC, a project intended to address the epidemic in medical
errors in the United States.
Mr. Knowlton obtained a Master of Arts in Educational Psychology from Trinity College and is a graduate
of the Sloan School of Management Healthcare Executive Development Program of Cornell University. He received
his BA from the University of Massachusetts.
Don Liss, M.D.
Board Member
Dr. Don Liss is Aetna's Mid-Atlantic Regional Medical Director. He oversees a staff
of nurses, physicians, and clinical support personnel responsible for promoting
the delivery of health care to over two million members of Aetna health plans in
PA, DE, MD, VA, WV, Southern NJ, and the District of Columbia. Dr. Liss joined Aetna
in 1997 as Senior Medical Director for Patient Management.
Dr. Liss is a native of Philadelphia and a 1987 graduate of the Medical College
of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University College of Medicine). He completed residency
training in Internal Medicine and served as Chief Medical Resident at Temple University
Hospital prior to a Clinician-Educator Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at
the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Liss was an associate in the
Department of Medicine at The Graduate Hospital, practicing primary care and consultative
general internal medicine, and performing administrative duties related to the internal
medicine residency training program and a Medicare + Choice HMO plan.
Prior to joining Aetna, Don served as Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs
at Health Partners, a Philadelphia area Medicaid plan, where he was responsible
for quality improvement, utilization management, pharmacy and provider network contracting.
Dr. Liss is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and has held faculty appointments
at Temple University School of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine and Drexel University College of Medicine. Dr. Liss served on the Cardiovascular
Health Advisory Panel for the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services,
currently serves as a member of the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council.
He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
Suzanne M. Miller, Ph.D.
Board Member
Dr. Suzanne M. Miller is Senior Member, Division of Population Science, at Fox Chase Comprehensive Cancer Center in Philadelphia and Director of the Psychosocial and Behavioral Medicine Program, the NCI-funded Behavioral Core Facility, and the DoD-funded Behavioral Center of Excellence in Breast Cancer. She is also the Director of the Intervention Development and Measurement Core of the NCI-funded Cancer Information Service Research Consortium. She obtained her Ph.D. in Clinical, Personality, and Health Psychology from the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, and is Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Rutgers University, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Behavioral Medicine, a member of the Executive Committees of the American Society of Preventive Oncology, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the American Psychosocial Oncology Society, and a Board Member of the New Jersey Institute for Health Care Quality and the American Cancer Society's Science Council.
Dr. Miller's most recent book is Individuals, Families, and the New Era of Genomics: Biopsychosocial Perspectives (Norton Publications, 2006), and she is about to release the Handbook of Cancer Control and Behavioral Science: A Resource for Researchers, Practitioners, and Policy Makers (American Psychological Association). Her funded research (from the NCI, ACS, LAF, and DoD) focuses on applying biobehavioral principles to promote the uptake of cancer prevention and control technologies. Dr. Miller received the Partners in Research Award from the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Information Service and the Cancer Control Award from the American Cancer Society, and has been a distinguished visiting professor in Japan, Australia, China, Italy, Holland, and Switzerland.
Jeffrey Peppercorn, MD, MPH
Chief Ethics Advisor
Dr. Jeffrey Peppercorn is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Duke University. He is also affiliated with the University of North Carolina Department of Social Medicine and the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Medical Oncology, and Hematology.
Dr. Peppercorn earned his A.B. degree with honors from Harvard College and obtained his M.D. at Harvard Medical School and M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital and and his medical oncology training through the Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care Oncology Fellowship Program. In addition, he completed the Medical Ethics Fellowship at Harvard University. For his work in bioethics related to oncology he was named a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar and he earned an American Society of Clinical Oncology Foundation Career Development Award in Health Disparities in Breast Cancer.
|
