About

Denny Brennan  is the Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC).  Denny has over 30 years of experience as a consultant and entrepreneur working with the country’s leading healthcare organizations on strategy, organizational effectiveness, and information and technology management. He brings specialized expertise in assisting organizations in aligning healthcare information and business strategies for success under increased market competition and health reform. His areas of emphasis include strategic and financial planning, organization structure and development, formation and management of Accountable Care Organizations, payment and reimbursement reform, and information technology strategy, including health information governance, security, and exchange. Denny has an MA in Education from Harvard University and MBA from Yale University.

Susan Adams, PMP, is the Vice President, Health Informatics for the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, where she oversees the Health Center Controlled Network and Health Informatics team, providing technology and data assistance to community health centers across the Commonwealth. Her current work focuses on various digital health tools, interoperability initiatives, and using advance data analytics for identifying and addressing disparities in health care for community health centers. Susan has worked in healthcare technology for 30 years, previously serving as the Chief Information Officer for a large Federally Qualified Health Center where she was responsible for the strategic direction and management of Information Technology, Quality Data & Reporting, Medical Records, and Referrals Departments. Susan’s strength lies in her ability to think outside the box and use technology and data to improve operational efficiencies.

Leon Barzin is the Director of Health Information Technology at the Massachusetts Medical Society. Leon focuses on providing information and resources on a wide variety of health Information Technologies to staff and members, creating communities around successful methods of technology implementation and use. Editor of the MMS Guide to Health Information Technology, he works with the Committee on Information Technology to provide technology leadership with the Society.

John Budaj  is the Vice President of Information Technology at Fallon Health. John is responsible for the overall IT vision, strategy, operations, and technology at Fallon Health. John has been with Fallon Health for over 9 years. In addition to his current role, John has led Information Management & Analytics as well as Medical Economics, Data Management & Reporting. Prior to joining Fallon Health, John spent 16 years at ConnectiCare, Inc. responsible for Data Management and Infrastructure and 7 years at United Healthcare. John is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and is an AHIP, Managed Healthcare Professional.

Peter Coakley is the Executive Vice President of Operations at LogixHealth, one of the largest medical coding and billing companies nationwide, providing services for both physicians and hospitals in over 40 states. Peter has been in the senior leadership of LogixHealth for almost 20 years, overseeing both revenue cycle management and technology. Previously, he spent seventeen years with the Massachusetts Department of Health and Hospitals in several roles including in the Patient Accounts department for the Long-Term Care Division. Peter has spent his entire career in the administrative aspects of healthcare. He has over 30 years of experience in revenue cycle management where he has successfully integrated continuously evolving technology solutions into operational processes.

Selma Ferhatbegovic-Fede is the senior vice president and chief information officer for Point32Health. In this role, she oversees the Information Technology, Business Continuity and Strategic Programs teams, as well as the Corporate Portfolio Management and Integration Management Offices.

Selma has more than 20 years of information technology experience. Prior to joining Point32Health, Selma spent nearly 13 years at Deloitte Consulting, beginning as a consultant and rising to senior manager of systems integration in the Life Sciences and Healthcare sector. Earlier in her career, she worked as a software developer for MadMax Optics in Needham, Massachusetts, and Wealth Compass in Boston, Massachusetts. Selma received a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Northeastern University.

Laurie Finigan is currently a Program Director on the Mass General Brigham Digital Team.   Responsibilities include oversight of the Epic Access applications that focus on Admissions, Scheduling, Registration, Authorizations, Referrals and MyChart among other areas.  Laurie is also responsible for the MGB eCommerce Team that supports the NEHEN connectivity.   Laurie has spent the majority of her 35 + year career at MGB focused on system optimization that improves operational efficiencies in the Revenue Cycle space and Patient Access Capacity. 

Rafael Garcia has diverse work experience spanning multiple industries and roles. Rafael most recently served as the Vice President - Engineering and Business Technology at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Previously, he worked as the Director of Digital Services at Aflac and as the Chief Technology Officer at DSR Technology Group, LLC. Rafael has spent a significant portion of their career at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its predecessor, HP. 

Dr. John Glaser is an Executive-in-Residence at the Harvard Medical School. He is a former senior vice president of population health, at Cerner Corporation. Previously he was chief executive officer of Siemens Health Services. Prior to Siemens, John was chief information officer at Partners HealthCare.

John was the founding chair of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the past president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He is a former chair of the board of the American Telemedicine Association and a former Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Digital Health, World Economic Forum. He was a Senior Advisor to the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Federal Department of Health and Human Services.

John received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He has written over 200 articles and four books on the strategic application of IT in health care. He is on the faculty of the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Dr. Howard Goldberg is the Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Clinical Informatics at Baystate Health. Howard has over 30 years of informatics experience, having started his career with teams
at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in developing some of the first clinical systems incorporating networks, relational databases, and multi-windowing clinical workstations. At Baystate Health, Howard oversees clinical systems strategy, data analytics and population health systems, health information management, and clinical engineering. He is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at UMass—Baystate. Prior to Baystate, Howard held positions at the Harvard teaching hospitals and in industry. He was Sr. Corporate Manager for Informatics Infrastructure at Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare System). Prior to Mass General Brigham, Howard was VP Product Development for Clinician Support Technology, a start-up focused on novel patient portal technology. Prior to Clinical Support Technology, Howard served as faculty at the Center for Clinical Computing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, having been Associate Director for Informatics at the Deaconess Hospital prior to the merger.

John Kelly provides strategic consulting the health care sector, specializing in digital transformation and the democratization of patient care delivery and administration data. John is a nationally recognized health information exchange expert. His wide-ranging experience includes serving as Principal Business Advisor for Edifecs, CIO of healthcare network provider NaviNet, director of eBusiness Architecture at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and managing director of his own health IT consulting firm. He also served as the architect and technical lead for the development of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ statewide HIE project.

Craig Monsen currently serves as Atrius Health’s Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Center Director for the Academic Institute’s Center for Informatics at Atrius Health. Craig is on a mission to leverage health information systems to enable the joyful practice of reliable, high-quality care. Craig  began his journey into informatics studying biomedical engineering and computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard. During medical school at Johns Hopkins, Craig co-founded his first startup, a data-driven symptom checker called Symcat that was regarded in a BMJ study as the most accurate symptom checker. He completed his combined internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Atrius Health primary care and went on to complete a clinical informatics fellowship at the University of Washington. During this training, Craig co-founded a second startup connecting streams of FHIR-enabled patient data to clinical care workflows that he later successfully sold. Craig’s research has included generating predictive models to promote population health, measuring the impact of electronic health records on provider work, and developing cost transparency tools that help nudge providers towards high value care. He writes and has been an invited, national speaker on topics of consumer engagement, applied predictive analytics, health information interoperability, and value-based care.

**Coming Soon**

Paul Pecoraro is the Senior Vice President, Revenue Cycle at Boston Children's Hospital. Paul often says, I “professionally grew up in healthcare.” With best intentions, he pursued an undergrad in Psychology to land a career as an MD. Struggling to decide whether to be a psychiatrist or neurologist, his path led him to co-op experiences for both, delivering hands-on care to disabled adults, as well as working as an administrative assistant for the Director of Patient Access. It didn’t take him long to realize a career in health care management allowed him more impact, with slightly different credentials. His early jobs included registration and bed placement, system analysis, and revenue cycle training. Driven to influence healthcare at the intersection of clinical, financial, and technical pillars, Paul’s path to various Revenue Cycle roles is a web that involves streamlining front-to-back revenue cycle models, implementing various revenue cycle systems from registration to bed management to billing and about everything in between. Having spent years in academic medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners Healthcare, at entity and corporate roles, he spent recent years working for CVS Health, overseeing strategic planning and revenue cycle for close to 1100 Minute Clinics, and creating digital strategy for functions such as registration, coding, enrollment and credentialing. Having augmented his leadership skills at a Fortune 7 for-profit company, his passion for academic medicine led him to Boston Children’s Hospital. With an aspirational slogan of “until every child is well,” currently leading Financial Clearance and Hospital AR, overseeing risk of approximately $1.8B between the Hospital and Professionals and collecting over $1.2B in cash for the Hospital, his colleagues and team wake up every day working for the #1 children’s hospital in the United States focused on administrative excellence. He has an undergraduate degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston. He currently lives on the South Shore of Boston with his wife and two sons.

Anu Puri is the Senior Director of Health Care Finance and Research for the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association. Anu has over fifteen years of experience in the health care finance and policy arena including in legislative, regulatory, financial and policy analysis. Her areas of specialization include payment and delivery system reform; healthcare cost and performance trends; impact modeling of reimbursement policy and Medicare quality-based payment reform initiatives. She assists MHA and its members in strategy development on a variety of health policy issues. Anu earned her M. from King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, India, and her MPH from Harvard University.

William Young is the Chief Information Officer at Berkshire Health Systems (BHS), where he implemented an Information Technology strategy that included a state-of-the-art Electronic Health system for both hospital-employed and community-based physicians across the Berkshires and has successfully led BHS to achieve Healthcare’s “Most-Wired.”

Bill is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a degree in Technical Management and concentration in Information Systems, Economics, and Business Law. He has been active in numerous professional and civic organizations, including serving on the Board of the Adams Community Bank and being an active member of the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME).