• Gretchen E. Alkema, PhD, LCSW
  (John Heinz/Health and Aging Policy Fellow)
  
• Brian K. Hensel, PhD, MSPH
• Gregory Hinrichsen, PhD
  
• Kathryn G. Kietzman, PhD, MSW
• Toni P. Miles, MD, PhD

• Elizabeth (Libbie) Bragg, PhD, RN
• Dorry Segev, MD
• Judy Zerzan, MD, MPH

Gretchen E. Alkema, PhD, LCSW

(John Heinz/Health and Aging Policy Fellow)

The SCAN Foundation, Vice President, Policy and Communications

Fellowship Placement: Office of Senator Blanche L. Lincoln

Gretchen E. Alkema, PhD, LCSW serves as Vice President of Policy and Communications for The SCAN Foundation.  Prior to joining the Foundation, she was the 2008-09 John Heinz/Health and Aging Policy Fellow and an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, serving in the office of Senator Blanche L. Lincoln (D-AR).  Dr. Alkema collaborated with legislative staff to advise Senator Lincoln on aging, health, mental health and long-term care policy.  Dr. Alkema holds a PhD from the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology and was awarded the John A. Hartford Doctoral Fellow in Geriatric Social Work and AARP Scholars Program Award.  She completed post-doctoral training at the VA Greater Los Angeles Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence and was a research associate for the California Fall Prevention Center of Excellence.  Her academic research focused on evaluating innovative models of chronic care management and translating effective models into practice.  Dr. Alkema also earned a master’s in social work with a specialist in aging certificate from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has practiced in government and non-profit settings including community mental health, care management, adult day health care, residential care and post-acute rehabilitation.

Brian K. Hensel, PhD, MSPH

Assistant Professor

Department of Health Services Administration

Beacom School of Business

University of South Dakota

Fellowship Placement: Office of Senator John D. Rockefeller

Brian K. Hensel, PhD, MSPH, has 15 years of experience as a health care executive, with responsibility for a range of services for older adults including long-term care, home health, and hospice, within vertically-integrated health systems.  He began his career in health administration after achieving a master's in public health from the University of Missouri (1987).  In 2001, he returned to the university to complete a PhD focused in health communication from the Missouri School of Journalism (2005), followed by a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellowship in Health Informatics (2005 - 2008).  His research interests include long-term care, including chronic disease management, and end-of-life care.  Dr. Hensel has served his fellowship in the office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, where he helped develop health information technology legislation within the Recovery Act and palliative care and advance planning legislation within the Finance Committee's health reform bill. 

Dr. Hensel is now an Assistant Professor at the University of South Dakota, in the Health Services Administration program of the Beacom School of Business. In addition to teaching health administration, including in long-term care, and pursing research interests, he is currently lead investigator on two grants. One is a project through the National Library of Medicine to assemble, for the Web, health communication variables with measures for use by scholars and public health practitioners. The other is to assess readiness of rural hospitals in South Dakota in meeting federal meaningful use criteria, for electronic health records, in response to Recovery Act incentive monies.

Gregory Hinrichsen, PhD

Community Mental Health Consultant

Office of Mental Health Services

Department of Veterans Affairs

Fellowship Placement: Department of Veterans Affairs

Gregory A. Hinrichsen, Ph.D., is a graduate of Harvard College and holds a doctorate in psychology with a focus on gerontology from New York University. In his 25 year career at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, he served in research, clinical, and administrative positions that included director of psychology training and associate director of psychology. He is associate clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Professional interests include the social context of late life depression, empirically-supported treatments for depression in older adults, and clinical geropsychology training --  topics on which he has published extensively. He has held various aging-related leadership positions in the American Psychological Association (APA).   During 2007-2008 Dr. Hinrichsen was an American Psychological Association/American Association for the Advancement of Science Congressional Fellow working in the office of Senator Ron Wyden on health and aging legislative issues. As part of the Health and Aging Policy Fellowship he spent a year at the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) Office of Mental Health Services as the Mental Health and Aging Policy Liaison. He is currently the Community Mental Health Consultant at DVA’s Office of Mental Health Services.

Kathryn G. Kietzman, PhD, MSW

Research Scientist,

UCLA Center for Health Policy Research

University of California, Los Angeles School of Public Health

Fellowship Placement: Office of Senator Debbie Stabenow

Kathryn G. Kietzman, PhD, MSW conducted her fellowship in the office of Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) where she worked on a broad array of health care reform initiatives related to mental health, aging, chronic care coordination, prevention and wellness, and the integration of health care delivery systems.

Now at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, Dr. Kietzman is the project director of the “Helping Older-Adults Maintain Independence” (HOME) Study, which examines how low-income older Californians with long-term care needs develop and sustain a network of care that enables them to remain safely in their own homes. She also works on the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) “Use and Impact Study,” an investigation of the utilization of health surveillance data and the scope of its influence on decision making among policy makers and program planners in California.

Dr. Kietzman earned her doctorate in social welfare from the UCLA School of Public Affairs where her dissertation research was supported by the John A. Hartford Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Her dissertation builds on a larger Atlantic Philanthropies and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded study concerned with expansion of the long-term care workforce. Dr. Kietzman completed both Bachelor and Master degrees in social welfare at UC Berkeley.

Toni P. Miles, MD, PhD

Director

Institute on Gerontology

University of Georgia, Athens

Fellowship Placement: US Senate Finance Committee

Toni P. Miles, M.D., Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute on Gerontology at the University of Georgia, Athens.  An alumna of Howard University College of Medicine, Dr. Miles has published extensively on aging, minority health, and health care inequity. During the Health and Aging Policy Fellowship, Dr. Miles served as a staffer on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee (Max Baucus, Chair).  Since completing the fellowship, she has traveled and lectured on facets of the health reform legislation.  She has recently been appointed as an advisor to the Kentucky Cabinet on Health and Family Services, Medicaid Cost Containment Committee.

She is under contract with ABC-CLIO for a policy analysis of the Accountable Care Act (ACA).  Can this law diminish health care inequity? ‘Health Care Reform and Disparities: History, Hype and Hope’ uses congressional records, recent court cases, and popular media to present a fresh perspective on this question.  The history of health policy in the U.S. is complex. It is the source of solutions. It is also the root of inequities. Where does the Accountable Care Act fit?  ACA goes beyond public plans to address inequity created by insurance business models. This analysis builds a bridge between policy and the emerging science of health disparities. It will appear in late summer 2012.

Elizabeth (Libbie) Bragg, PhD, RN

Research Associate Professor

Department of Family and Community Medicine

Associate Professor, College of Nursing

University of Cincinnati

Elizabeth (Libbie) Bragg, PhD, RN, (2008-2010 Health and Aging Policy Fellows) is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Cincinnati. She received her MSN from Ohio State University in 1987 and her PhD in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati in 1999. Her dissertation topic was “How Do Issues Get on the Agenda of State Legislatures?” Dr. Bragg has over 37 years experience in teaching, research, administration, practice, and volunteer activities. In 1980, with a colleague, she started her own business, RN Consultants, Inc. From 1986 to 1987, she was State Director of Public Health Nursing and Acting Director, Division of Local Health, West Virginia State Health Department.  She has worked on several election campaigns, and in 1986 was the campaign manager for the successful re-election of a candidate for the West Virginia House of Delegates. She was a member of the American Geriatrics Society Task Force on Caring for Older Americans: the Future of Geriatric Medicine, and was an expert reviewer for Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) 2005 National Agenda for Geriatric Education: White Papers. She was named one of Cincinnati’s Leading Women in the area of Health Care in 2002.  She is a member of the American Geriatrics Society’s Public Policy Committee and Relative Value Scale Update Committee. Dr. Bragg is currently co-investigator for the Geriatrics Workforce Policy Studies Center, and has co-authored 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts related to geriatrics training and practice. She teaches health policy courses at the University of Cincinnati.  As part of her fellowship, Dr. Bragg worked on geriatrics workforce issues, and Medicare issues.

Dorry Segev, MD, PhD

Director, Clinical Research, Transplant Surgery,
Director, OPUS (Older Patients Undergoing Surgery) Training Program, and
Associate Professor of Surgery
Johns Hopkins University

Dorry Segev, MD, PhD, is a practicing transplant surgeon, a clinical epidemiologist, and an Associate Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University. After receiving a degree in Computer Science at Rice University, Dr. Segev completed medical school, surgery residency, a multivisceral transplant surgery fellowship, an MHS in biostatistices, and a PhD in clinical investigation at Johns Hopkins. As a young faculty member, he has already made important contributions to the field of transplant surgery through his seminal work in Kidney Paired Donation, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, featured in TIME Magazine's yearly Innovators feature, awarded the American Society for Transplant Surgeon's Vanguard Prize, and is currently being implemented on a national scale by the United Network for Organ Sharing. Dr. Segev has authored over 70 peer-reviewed manuscripts and has been the recipient of an NIH Clinical Research Scholars Award, an American Society for Transplantation Clinical Science Award, an American Geriatric Society Dennis Jahnigen Scholar Award, and a Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award.

He is currently exploring age disparities in access to kidney transplantation, and developing tools for improved clinical decision-making in older patients with kidney failure.  For his fellowship, Dr. Segev is examining both clinical and policy approaches to improving access to transplantation for those older patients who stand to benefit from it.   As a fellow, Dr. Segev has been working with the United Network for Organ Sharing (HRSA/HHS) to help design an organ allocation policy that balances justice and utility but avoids age discrimination. Dr. Segev also recently demonstrated that the gender gap in access to kidney transplants was limited to older women (NY Times, 1/9/09), setting the stage for evaluation and possible policy oversight of provider referral patterns for older adults who are candidates for organ transplants.

Judy Zerzan, MD, MPH

Chief Medical Officer/ Deputy Medicaid Director
Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing

Fellowship Placement: Office of Senator John D. Rockefeller and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Dr. Zerzan is Chief Medical Officer/ Deputy Medicaid Director for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. As Chief Medical Officer, she provides clinical guidance for policy, quality improvement and program development for medical and pharmacy benefits. She has a role in the design and implementation of Colorado Medicaid’s expansions with a focus on benefits design, quality and health outcome improvement, and cost-containment efforts.  She is also a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver.

Dr. Zerzan received her MD degree from Oregon Health and Science University in 1998 and her MPH in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina in 1999. She completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington/Seattle VA in 2007. Dr. Zerzan was a 2008-2010 non-residential Health and Aging Policy Fellow in the office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia. During her fellowship, she worked on policies related to Medicaid, CHIP, benefits for those dually-eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, and prescription drugs. She continues a role in national health policy serving on AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Stakeholder Group, a Mathmatica Technical Advisory Panel to evaluate spending of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds on Comparative Effectiveness Research, and serves on the steering committee of the Medicaid Medical Director’s Learning Network.