- 50,500 patients assisted in 2009.
- $118 million+ awarded to patients in 2009.
- 16,000 callers assisted each month.
- Over 95,000 patients helped to date.
- Recognized by Forbes.com as one of the 20 most efficient charities in America.
Our Leadership
An independent Board of Directors oversees the HealthWell Foundation and makes all decisions regarding program criteria and financial awards.
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
Advisor
- Jeffrey Peppercorn, MD, MPH, Chief Ethics Advisor
Stephen M. Weiner, President
Steve is the Chair of Mintz Levin’s Health Law practice. He has had over thirty years of experience in the health care field as a policy maker, educator and attorney. He represents health care services providers in a broad array of legal matters. He works and has worked with providers in undertaking strategic positioning; structuring payor strategies and clinical integration initiatives; mergers, acquisitions, strategic affiliations, "demergers," and joint venture arrangements, including between tax-exempt and for-profit organizations. He has also been involved in a number of international health care activities, including participating in the structuring of the health care regulatory system for the Dubai Healthcare City, where he is also serving on the licensing board. Domestically, Steve has been very active with regard to the development and implementation of Massachusetts’ signature health care reform program.
In addition, Steve represents health care providers in developing, monitoring and restructuring relationships between hospitals and physicians; regulatory and reimbursement matters, including licensure, certification and determination (certificate) of need proceedings, managed care contracting, Medicare reimbursement and appeals, and Medicaid and uncompensated care pool reimbursement; general contracting; and, for academic medical centers specifically, clinical research, conflict of interest, relationships with affiliated medical schools and relationships with federally qualified community health centers.
Steve also works extensively with the U.S. Department of Defense on matters relating to the TRICARE Prime benefit and the operations of the U.S. Family Health Plan program.
Steve currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Medical Tourism Association, a non-profit association supporting the use by American residents of high quality medical care resources abroad (www.medicaltravelauthority.com), and he serves as pro bono legal counsel to the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, a foundation promoting compassionate care and more effective patient/caregiver communications (www.theschwartzcenter.org).
Steve is currently an Adjunct Professor of Law at Suffolk University School of Law, where he teaches a course on corporate relationships in the health care field and that focuses on the constraints on business decisions created by application of antitrust law, fraud and abuse/Stark rules, and the implications of being tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Steve has been listed in the health law section of The Best Lawyers in America since the section originated, in Who's Who in America, and in The Boston Globe Magazine's "Boston's Best Lawyers." He is also nationally ranked by Chambers and Partners as renowned for his strategic and policy work. In 2008, Steve Weiner was selected by Massachusetts Medical Law Reports as a winner of its Rx for Excellence Leaders in Quality award (www.mamedicallaw.com).
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 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.