AdvaMed® Payment Policy Forum

Emma Alme leads diagnostics policy development and strategy across Guardant Health for both oncology and cancer screening. She received a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, San Francisco and has wide-ranging health policy experience including at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Dr. Alpert served as Vice President of Regulatory Sciences for C.R. Bard, Inc. She also previously worked at FDA where she held a variety of positions in the Centers dealing with drugs, devices and radiological health, and foods, including six years as the Director of the Office of Device Evaluation. Dr. Alpert is a microbiologist and a pediatrician with a specialty in infectious diseases and has practical experience in laboratory research and clinical trials.

Dr. Alpert serves on the board of advisors for the Medical Technology Leadership Forum and the board of the Women Business Leaders, or organization of women leaders in the health care sector. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, one of the public/private partnerships working with FDA to streamline the development of medical products.

Brett Baker is a Partner at The Nickles Group. His extensive legislative and policy experience have earned him the respect and trust of policymakers across the political spectrum that helps clients achieve their goals. He spent over a decade on Capitol Hill negotiating the most significant Medicare bills that passed Congress during that time. He has shaped health care policies that have touched every sector of the health care industry. Brett also played a leading role in shaping the prescription pricing policy debate and COVID-19 relief laws enacted during the first year of the pandemic.

Brett worked for the powerful Senate Finance Committee where he held key health staff positions under Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R-ID). Prior to his service in the Senate, Brett was a professional staff member for the influential House Ways and Means Committee under Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Paul Ryan (R-WI), overseeing Medicare policy.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Brett began his career at the American College of Physicians in Washington, D.C.

Brett has a bachelor of science in Health Policy and Administration from the Pennsylvania State University.

Carol Blackford is the Executive Vice President of Payment and Health Care Delivery Policy at AdvaMed. AdvaMed’s Payment and Health Care Delivery Policy department develops and advocates for policies to ensure and expand patient access to medical technologies by improving coverage, coding, and payment processes used by Medicare and commercial payers.

Ms. Blackford comes to AdvaMed with over two decades of health care policy experience. Prior to joining AdvaMed in 2023, Ms. Blackford served as a Senior Executive and Director of the Hospital and Ambulatory Policy Group in the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). In this role, Ms. Blackford had responsibility for payment and benefits policy on the acute care side of the Medicare Fee-For Service Program. These payment systems, which account for approximately $270 billion in Medicare spending, include inpatient and outpatient hospital services, physician services, Part B drugs and laboratory services, and other acute care services and providers. During her 28 year career at CMS, Ms. Blackford lead work in every major Medicare fee-for-service payment system and served in a number of enterprise wide leadership roles, including serving as the Agency’s COVID-19 Pandemic Response Coordinator.

Lindsay Bockstedt, Ph.D. is Vice President of Global Health Economics and Outcomes Research at Medtronic, Inc. In her role, Dr. Bockstedt leads the global HEOR function at Medtronic, focusing on developing evidence to support the coverage, payment, and access to medical technologies. She has established enterprise-wide standards to ensure transparency, reproducibility and rigor for non-interventional studies using secondary data. Dr. Bockstedt has deep domain expertise in observational research methods, real-world data regulations, health policy, and health technology assessment. She has led several RWE programs, including highly visible ones that have established new approaches and standards for the application and use of RWE in regulatory and payer decision-making. Her work has influenced international medical guidelines and has been published in top-tier journals.

She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in health services research and policy from the University of Minnesota, and B.S. in public health from Rutgers University. Dr. Bockstedt sits on multiple industry leadership groups for organizations such as International Society for Pharmacoeconomics Research (ISPOR) Institutional Council, Health Technology Assessment International, and the Medical Device Innovation Consortium.

Chandra Branham, JD, joined Johnson & Johnson’s Global Government Affairs and Policy team in January 2023 as Senior Director, leading health policy development for the medtech sector. She had most recently served as Senior Vice President, Payment and Health Care Delivery Policy, at the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), since 2011, where she led AdvaMed’s policy work in a number of areas, including Medicare coverage and payment issues, diagnostic payment, and value of medical technology. Prior to joining AdvaMed, Ms. Branham was an associate at large D.C. law firm where she focused on healthcare regulatory and legislative issues involving Medicare coverage, coding, reimbursement and quality for providers and suppliers of Medicare items and services.

Ms. Branham previously was a senior legislative analyst at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Office of Legislation; and early in her career, served as associate director of regulatory affairs at the National Association for Home Care. She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Drexel University and a JD from the George Mason University School of Law.

Chris serves as VP, Market Access and Reimbursement for Impulse Dynamics, Inc., a medical device manufacturer dedicated to transforming treatment of chronic heart failure. Previously, he has held positions at medical device manufacturers of various size in sales, sales management, strategy and healthcare economics. Additionally, he held multiple roles for a privately-held owner/operator of specialty medical practices in the U.S. and overseas. He started his career in the financial technology sector. Chris earned his B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and M.B.A. from the University of Michigan.

He and his amazing wife, Kristen, have three terrific children. They also have two equally terrific doodles, both of whom occasionally offer canine opinions on matters related to coding, coverage, payment and policy on conference calls. Working in the medical technology and healthcare fields has given Chris the opportunity to learn from many amazing individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. The chance to participate in exchange of ideas with such people at conferences like this one is something he considers a great privilege.

Tara Burke, PhD is Vice President for Payment and Healthcare Delivery at the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed). In this role, she is responsible for a variety of policy issues, with a significant focus on coding, coverage, and payment for diagnostic tests. She joined AdvaMed in 2022 from the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), where she served as Senior Director of Public Policy & Advocacy. At AMP she led efforts to inform and influence regulatory and reimbursement issues affecting molecular diagnostics. Dr. Burke has over a decade of biomedical research experience specializing in biochemistry, molecular genetics, and epigenetics. After receiving her BS in Molecular Biology from Vanderbilt University and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics from The University of Virginia, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the NIH

Laura Findeiss, MD, MHA is a Principal at Rubrum Advising, bringing extensive clinical and operational healthcare leadership experience spanning a diversity of practice settings and geographic regions. Prior to her current role, she was the Director of the Division of Policy and Evidence Review in the Coverage and Analysis Group at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, where she led the team drafting national Medicare coverage policy. Her work at CMS built on her leadership experiences as Chair of Radiology at University of Tennessee Medical Center and Chief of Service for Radiology at Grady Health System in Atlanta, as well as her subsequent experience as legislative staff in the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dedicated to lifelong learning, she is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow and serves as a member of the Board of Examiners for the Baldrige National Quality Award. Dr. Findeiss continues to practice as a vascular and interventional radiologist, is the Chair of the Cardiovascular Radiology and Intervention Council for the American Heart Association, serves on the Advisory Board of the Neiman Health Policy Institute, and is a past president of the Society of Interventional Radiology.

In her current position as Principal at Rubrum Advising, Dr. Findeiss leverages her coverage expertise to facilitate market access and focuses on strategies to improve hospital quality and safety. Her additional interests include provider alignment, operational excellence, value-based models for specialty care, and private sector innovation as a driver of system transformation.

Lee A. Fleisher, MD, ML (Masters in Law) is the former Chief Medical Officer and Director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2020-2023) and Founding Principal and CEO at Rubrum Advising. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and continues to practice clinically. He is also the LLC. He serves as a Senior Advisor of the Bipartisan Policy Center and FasterCures of the Milken Institute, Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and Visiting Fellow of the Duke-Margolis Center. He is a member of the HITAC of the ONC. As CMS CMO, he was responsible for executing all national clinical, quality, and safety standards for healthcare facilities and providers, as well as establishing coverage determinations for items and services that improve health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries.

From 2004 through July 2020, he was the Robert D. Dripps Professor and Chair of Anesthesiology and Critical Care and Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2007, he was elected to membership of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and served on Committees including the Board of Health Services of the NAM.

Nancy Foster is the former Vice President for Quality and Patient Safety Policy at the American Hospital Association. In this role, she provided advice to public policymakers on legislation and regulations intended to improve patient safety and quality in America’s hospitals and health systems. Nancy worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and several other federal agencies.

She was the AHA’s point person at the National Quality Forum and the AHA’s liaison to the Joint Commission’s Board. She represented hospital and health system perspectives to key policymakers and played a pivotal role during the COVID 19 pandemic to assist the Federal agencies with information and secure Agencies help as hospitals dealt with surging demand for care and shortages of needed resources. Prior to joining the AHA, Nancy was the Coordinator for Quality Activities at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and principal staff person for the Quality Interagency Coordination Task Force. She led the development of patient safety research agenda for AHRQ and managed a portfolio of quality and safety research grants in excess of $10 million. She is a graduate of Princeton University and has completed graduate work at Johns Hopkins University. In 2000, she was chosen as an Excellence in Government Leadership Fellow.

Dr. Frank brings 4 decades of success in regulatory labeling of public and private coverage, and payment for clinical adoption of therapeutic and diagnostic drugs and devices.  His interests include addressing product-, market-, or delivery system-specific inefficiencies and issues which burden payers and delay or skew patients’ access to the benefits of innovation.  Dr. Frank is devoted to the development of and advocacy for clearance to market and payment for healthcare AI, including regulations, standards, coding, [ AI Taxonomy ] valuation, coverage, and payment policy.

Juli Goldstein is the Vice President for Government Affairs and Market Access at Digital Diagnostics. In her role, she leads advocacy, policy, payer relations and reimbursement strategy. Juli has over 20 years of experience across the global healthcare industry, specializing in payment and coverage. She has held roles in the medical device, health technology, payer and policy sectors, where her responsibilities have ranged from attaining coverage and payment for new medical technologies and writing medical policies and creating health insurance products within a managed care environment.

Prior to joining Digital Diagnostics, Juli led the government affairs, channel strategy and policy functions at Medela Inc and the global market access function at Abbott Diabetes Care. She began the first part of her career writing coverage policies and clinical practice guidelines inside of health plans and health policy organizations, including Kaiser Permanente and the World Health Organization.

Juli holds her Master’s degree in Health Science/International Health from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Thomas Gustafson, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Advisor at Arnold & Porter, where he concentrates on health care policy and reimbursement issues. Since joining Arnold & Porter in 2008, he has advised health-care providers, device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and trade associations on a wide array of issues, including physician, hospital, clinical laboratory, and end-stage renal disease reimbursement systems; accountable care organizations; and launch and reimbursement issues, inlcuding coverage, coding and payment, for devices, laboratory tests, and pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Gustafson spent 32 years at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 24 of which were at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, where he held several executive posts responsible for Medicare and Medicaid legislation, strategic planning, research and demonstrations, and development and implementation of regulations. From 2003 to 2007, Dr. Gustafson served as Deputy Director of the Center for Medicare Management (CMM), which coordinated the fee-for-service portion of the Medicare program and set payment rates for more than a million providers. He supervised coding and payment policies affecting approximately $300 billion in Medicare spending on hospitals, physicians, nursing facilities, home health agencies, and other providers. He led the development and introduction of the hospital outpatient prospective payment system and major improvements in Medicare’s other payment policies and systems. He oversaw a sweeping reform, intended to improve accountability and efficiency, of Medicare’s administrative structure for paying claims. In 2006-2007, he served as Acting Director of the CMM.

Jamie Haggard co-founded Green Sun Medical in 2013 and is currently Board Chair and CEO.  Green Sun Medical is transforming the treatment of scoliosis.  Jamie brings over 20 years of award-winning executive experience in the spine and orthopedic implant industry.  Prior to founding Green Sun Medical, he held two VP of sales positions.  During his career, he has helped launch disruptive technologies such as the artificial disc replacement and lateral spine fusion implants.  In addition, he was named to AdvaMed’s Orthopedic Sector, Digital Health Executive Leadership Team, and Pediatric Working Group.
Jamie is passionate about improving pediatric medical device outcomes.

Beth Halpern helps health care clients achieve coverage and reimbursement for innovative technologies. She advises pharmaceutical and device manufacturers, health care providers, and trade associations about Medicare and other payers’ policies and develops strategies to improve access to care. Beth helps clients advocate before administrative agencies and Congress, and she advises about Medicare law for clients involved in litigation.

In more than 15 years of practice, Beth has worked with clients on securing coding, coverage, and reimbursement for many new drugs, devices, and medical services. By analyzing the regulatory landscape, including Medicare’s payment systems for drugs and biologicals, physicians, hospitals, dialysis clinics, and durable medical equipment, she has helped clients benefit from health reform and take advantage of incentive payments for new technologies. She advises clients not only about what the law is now, but also about how to change the law, drafting amendments to the Medicare law and successfully advocating for changes to regulations and coverage policies.

Zach Hochstetler is the Vice President of CPT Coding and Payment at the American Medical Association’s Health Solutions business unit. He leads the strategic development of the AMA’s CPT® code set and CPT Editorial Panel process, working closely with key stakeholders to deliver trusted, high-value data to the healthcare ecosystem. Under his leadership, CPT continues to evolve as the definitive standard for procedure coding, ensuring the AMA remains at the forefront of healthcare innovation, data integrity, and reporting accuracy.

hristine Jackson serves as the Vice President for Global Health Policy and Health Law Counsel at Medtronic. In these roles, Christine works to shape federal health policy for medical technology innovations, with a specific focus on leading the development of policy initiatives that advance patient access to Medtronic products and therapies enterprise wide. In addition, Christine provides legal subject matter expertise to business attorneys, compliance officers, and members of the Reimbursement function to navigate areas of health law impacting Medtronic.

Christine joined Medtronic in August 1997 and has served in various health policy, reimbursement, and legal roles throughout her years with the company, including roles in the Neuromodulation and Cardiac Rhythm Heart Failure businesses and the Corporate function. Christine has experience in strategic reimbursement planning, health policy and advocacy, reimbursement training and education, clinical study reimbursement, and health law. Christine started her career with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Christine graduated from the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota with her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and is a graduate of Mitchell Hamline School of Law (formerly William Mitchell College of Law) in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is a licensed attorney in the state of Minnesota.

Robert Jarrin is a strategic advisor on digital health and medicine to various companies, associations, and medical organizations. Jarrin’s areas of expertise include CPT coding of digital services, CMS coverage and payment of digital medical services, FDA regulation of digital health, and ONC policies on Health IT interoperability.

Jarrin has served on several Federal Advisory Committees covering innovation, safety, health IT standards, and consumer advocacy. He has testified numerous times before the U.S. House of Representatives providing expert testimony on innovation, mobile medical apps, and the 21st Century Cures Act. Jarrin has also participated on a federally sponsored Technical Expert Panel (TEP) on the use of technology to facilitate clinical preventive services. He currently serves as a founding member of the American Medical Association (AMA) Digital Medicine Payment Advisory Group (DMPAG).

Justin Klein, MD, JD, is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Vensana Capital, a leading venture capital and growth equity firm dedicated to medtech innovation. Justin currently or previously served on the board of directors of Apella, Cartiva (acquired), ChromaCode, Cleerly, Curate BioSciences, CV Ingenuity (acquired), Epix Therapeutics (acquired), Evident Vascular, Intact Vascular (acquired), Personal Genome Diagnostics (acquired), PhaseBio Pharmaceuticals (IPO), Relievant Medsystems (acquired), Senseonics (IPO), Topera (acquired), Ulthera (acquired), Vertiflex (acquired), Vesper Medical (acquired), and VytronUS (acquired). Justin currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association and that of AdvaMed Accel, where he is the Vice Chair of the Investor Advisory Committee of AdvaMed’s board. He is also a member of the board of directors of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, one of the country’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organizations that serves over 3.5 million patients in the greater Washington, DC, region.

Prior to Vensana, Justin was a partner and leader of the medical technology investing practice at NEA, one of the largest and most active venture capital firms in the world. Justin also worked at the Duke University Health System where his experience included roles in strategy, finance, and operations as Duke built one of the nation’s first integrated healthcare delivery systems. Justin graduated with an AB in Economics, a BS in Biological Anthropology & Anatomy, and a Minor in Chemistry from Duke University. He also concurrently earned an MD from the Duke University School of Medicine and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Dr. Lucas has over twenty years of experience in engineering safety in the healthcare, automotive, maritime, and defense industries. He has served as a principal consultant on hundreds of engagements with hospital executives, clinical providers, medical device manufacturers, defense and plaintiff attorneys, accreditors, and regulators, testified in court and national hearings on various medical device hazards and investigations, and has authored hundreds of technical reports and academic publications.

At ECRI, Dr. Lucas is the head of medical device safety activities, including device evaluations, preventive consulting services, accident and forensic investigation, and problem reporting services. Also at ECRI, he has served as the Principal and Director of Accident and Forensic Investigation.

Liesl’s passion is to articulate the clinical value of new technologies and minimize barriers to patient access. Her leadership in market access, health economics, and reimbursement has spanned more than 2 decades in pharma and medical devices including digital health. Liesl is currently VP, Reimbursement and Market Access at Mainstay Medical and has held roles at AppliedVR, ResMed, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Covidien (now Medtronic), J&J Cordis, and Eli Lilly & Company. Liesl also lectures on Innovation in the MBA program at UCSD.

Parashar is an accomplished healthcare executive with a demonstrated history of leadership in the medical device industry and public sector. He brings more than 30 years of health policy and market access experience to clients.
Parashar develops efficient and effective plans to engage stakeholders, including healthcare policymakers and payers in the United States and abroad. His areas of expertise include payment and coverage policy, market access strategies, healthcare delivery systems, medical devices and clinical research.

Prior to joining McDermottPlus, Parashar served as senior vice president for government affairs and market access at ViewRay, where he led global efforts to drive adoption of MRIdian in cancer treatment. He previously led Boston Scientific’s global teams focused on the development and execution of market access, health economics and public policy strategies for key technologies.

Christine oversees the strategic planning and execution of coding, coverage, and payment strategies for the Transcatheter Mitral and Tricuspid Therapies (TMTT) portfolio at Edwards Lifesciences. She focuses on health policy and reimbursement for a portfolio that includes early-stage technologies to commercialized technologies. Her work requires close cross-functional collaboration across Edwards, as well as with external groups including professional societies, policymakers, and patient advocacy groups. Christine’s areas of focus include US health policy, reimbursement strategy planning (including coding, coverage, and payment), Medicare payment systems (IPPS, OPPS, ASC, PFS, and others), clinical trial reimbursement, and reimbursement training programs.

Prior to joining Edwards, Christine worked for 14 years as a health policy and market access consultant developing reimbursement strategies and advancing policy to achieve market access for healthcare companies. As a consultant, she supported her reimbursement strategy and health policy work with data analytics, including budget impact models, gaining insights from real-world data, Medicare claims analyses, and replication of Medicare payment calculations. Christine received her Bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and Master’s degree in Public Health from Yale University. She resides in Los Angeles, CA with her family.

Elizabeth Thoma is the Director of Health Economics and Reimbursement for Abbott’s Structural Heart business. After engineering roles across pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing and research and development, she took an opportunity to learn about health economics and outcomes research. For over 10 years now she has focused on global market access and value enablement through evidence generation.

Board Certified Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon
Board Certified Otolaryngologist Head and Neck Surgeon
University of Florida College of Medicine–MD degree
Vanderbilt University—BA Chemistry
Former PA instructor for Nova Southeastern University
Private Practice Facial Plastic Surgery for 30 years

Accrediation Association for Ambulatory Health Care Surveyor

Contractor Medical Director for Palmetto GBA 2023–to present

Venk is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nanowear, a New York-based connected-care and companion diagnostics technology platform built upon first-of-its-kind cloth-based nanosensors. Nanowear was founded in 2014 and received its first FDA 510(k) Class II clearance in December 2016, establishing Nanowear as the first-and-only company in the world to receive this accreditation for cloth-nanotechnology-based remote monitoring. Nanowear’s first product, SimpleSense, which launched clinically in July 2019, is an undergarment that captures and algorithmically scores 7 metrics from the body, alerting hospital providers of worsening Heart Failure ~3 weeks in advance of a hospitalizing event. Nanowear’s business model centers around its CHF digital therapeutic device and select licensing opportunities of its cloth-based nanosensors to Healthcare OEMs.

Before Nanowear, Venk spent ~7 years in Technology Investment Banking, focusing exclusively on venture-backed software and communications technology in which he successfully advised growth companies in over $3bn USD worth of transactions at UBS Investment Bank, Citadel Investment Group and Wells Fargo Securities in New York. Prior to his finance career, Venk spent ~ 3 years in product marketing and sales at Eli Lilly and Sanofi Aventis Pharmaceuticals in New York.