Trustees

The Board of Trustees govern the ABIM Foundation, and both guide and help advance the Foundation's work in medical professionalism. The Trustees include national leaders in quality assessment and improvement, medical education, consumer advocates, policy makers, purchasers, and physician leaders who have served on the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Board of Directors.

• Glenn M. Hackbarth, JD, MA, Chair
• Donald E. Wesson, MD, Vice-Chair
• Holly J. Humphrey, MD, Secretary-Treasurer
• Richard J. Baron, MD
• Christine K. Cassel, MD
• David B. Hellmann, MD
• Sheila T. Leatherman, MSw
• Deborah Leff, JD
• Wendy S. Levinson, MD
• Elizabeth McGlynn, PhD
• John J. Popovich, Jr., MD
• David B. Reuben, MD
• John Rother, JD

Glenn M. Hackbarth, JD, MA

Chair

Glenn Hackbarth is Chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. He has experience as a health care executive, government official and policy analyst. He was elected to the Board of Trustees of the ABIM Foundation in 2006 and currently serves as Chair.

Mr. Hackbarth was Chief Executive Officer and one of the founders of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, a multispecialty group practice in Boston that serves as a major teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Mr. Hackbarth previously served as Senior Vice President of Harvard Community Health Plan and President of its Health Centers Division, as well as Washington Counsel of Intermountain Health Care. He has held various positions at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including Deputy Administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration (now known as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).

He is a member of Board of Directors of The Commonwealth Fund and a former board member of the National Committee for Quality Assurance. He also serves on the Commonwealth Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System.

Mr. Hackbarth received his bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University and his masters and law degrees from Duke University.

Donald E. Wesson, MD

Vice-Chair

Dr. Wesson, a board certified internist and nephrologist, is currently Vice Dean of the Texas A&M College of Medicine and Chief Academic Officer, Scott and White Healthcare in Temple, TX. He serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the ABIM Foundation Board of Trustees.

He was named Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at Texas Tech in 1999 and served until 2006, after which he assumed his current position at Texas A&M College of Medicine. Previously, Dr. Wesson was on the faculty at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center as Nephrology Division Chief. He also served on the Baylor College of Medicine faculty.

Dr. Wesson is Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society of Nephrology, and is a member of the American Association of Physicians. He is a past President of the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation and a former member and Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

He received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attended Washington University School of Medicine and received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Wesson completed his residency in internal medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine Affiliated Hospitals and his nephrology fellowship at the University of Illinois.

Holly J. Humphrey, MD

Secretary-Treasurer

Dr. Humphrey, a board certified internist, is Professor of Medicine and Dean for Medical Education at The University of Chicago. She served as Chief Medical Resident before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1989. Dr. Humphrey was promoted to Professor in 2000 and was the first clinician-educator at The University of Chicago awarded tenure. Dr. Humphrey is a member of the Board of Trustees of the ABIM Foundation and she previously served on the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine from 2001 to 2007, including a term as Chair from 2006 to 2007.

Prior to accepting her current position as Dean, she spent fourteen years as Director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program.

Dr. Humphrey was recently elected a Master by the American College of Physicians (ACP). In 2009, Crain's Chicago Business featured her as one of their "Women to Watch." She is a former President (1995) of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine and later received the Dema C. Daley Founders Award from that same organization. Dr. Humphrey has authored more than 60 articles and edited three books, including Mentoring in Academic Medicine.

An honors graduate of the Pritzker School of Medicine, Dr. Humphrey completed her residency and pulmonary-critical care fellowship at The University of Chicago.

Richard J. Baron, MD

Dr. Baron practices general internal medicine at Greenhouse Internists, P.C., located in the City of Philadelphia. Dr. Baron's practice has been a pioneer in the comprehensive adoption of electronic health records in the small practice environment. He is a former Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Board of Directors and currently is a Trustee of the ABIM Foundation.

Dr. Baron served as Chief Medical Officer of Health Partners, a not-for-profit Medicaid HMO set up by four teaching hospitals in Philadelphia, from 1988 to 1996. He was the architect of the Best Clinical and Administrative Practices program, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Center for Health Care Strategies, working with medical leadership of Medicaid health plans around the country in learning collaboratives to improve the quality of care for their members. This program reached plans serving more than half of the Medicaid managed care population in the United States.

He became a member of the Board of the National Quality Forum in December, 2009, and serves on their Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC). He has been a member of the National Committee for Quality Assurance Standards Committee since 2005. Dr. Baron is board certified in internal medicine and geriatric medicine having voluntarily renewed the both certificates twice.

Dr. Baron received an English degree from Harvard and his medical degree from Yale. He did house staff training at NYU-Bellevue and served a three-year obligation in the National Health Service Corps in rural Tennessee.

Christine K. Cassel, MD

Dr. Cassel, a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care, is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation. She is board certified in internal medicine and geriatric medicine.

Dr. Cassel is past President of the American Federation for Aging Research and the American College of Physicians. She also formerly served as Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health and Science University, Chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Chief of General Internal Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Cassel is one of 20 scientists chosen by U.S. President Barack Obama to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and is co-Chair and Physician Leader of a PCAST working group that makes recommendations to the President on issues relating to health information technology. She served on the Institute of Medicine (IOM)'s Comparative Effective Research (CER) Committee mandated by Congress to set priorities for the national CER effort. She also served on the IOM committees that wrote the influential reports "To Err is Human" and "Crossing the Quality Chasm." In 2010, Modern Healthcare named Dr. Cassel among the 50 most powerful physicians. An active scholar and lecturer, she is the author or co-author of 14 books and more than 150 journal articles on geriatric medicine, aging, bioethics and health policy.

A graduate of the University of Chicago, Dr. Cassel received her medical degree from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards of distinction, including Fellowship in the Royal Colleges of Medicine of the United Kingdom and Canada, and Mastership in the American College of Physicians.

Top

David Hellmann, MD

Dr. Hellmann, board certified in internal medicine and rheumatology, is the Aliki Perroti Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Vice Dean for Johns Hopkins, and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. In 2004, he created the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Medicine (CIM), which seeks to improve the quality of medical care on the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus by promoting innovations in patient care and medical research and in 1998, he co-founded the Johns Hopkins Vasculitis Center.

Dr. Hellmann, a Master of the American College of Physicians, is a recipient of teaching awards from the University of California, San Francisco; Johns Hopkins University and from the American College of Physicians and a recipient of local and national "Best Doctor" awards. He is also author of more than 150 articles and chapters, is an associate editor of Medicine and The American Journal of Medicine and serves on the editorial board of The Pharos.

Dr. Hellmann is a Trustee of the ABIM Foundation, and has served as Governor of the Maryland Chapter of the American College of Physicians, and as a Director of the American Board of Internal Medicine (2000-2006).

Dr. Hellmann is a graduate of Yale College and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Following his internship and residency on the Osler Medical Service at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Hellmann completed his rheumatology fellowship training at the University of California, San Francisco.

Sheila T. Leatherman, MSw

Sheila Leatherman is a Research Professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Visiting Professor of the London School of Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

Since 1997, she has worked in the U.K. as an independent evaluator of the impact on quality of care in the National Health Service of the Labor Governments’ reforms resulting in three books. In 2007, Ms. Leatherman was awarded the honor of Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for her work over the past decade in the National Health Service. She was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a member of the Institute of Medicine and made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. She serves as a Trustee of the ABIM Foundation.

Ms. Leatherman is the research advisor to a four-year demonstration project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and test innovations linking health programs with microcredit in India, West Africa, Bolivia and the Philippines. Currently, she is conducting a two-year project to assess global evidence of the impact of systematically integrating microfinance and health access interventions for the poor.

She has a broad background in health care management in State and Federal health agencies, as Chief Executive of an HMO, and as a senior executive of United Health Group in the United States. Ms. Leatherman is active in humanitarian relief in the developing world, serving two organizations as a Trustee and active volunteer; Freedom from Hunger and the American Refugee Committee.

Deborah Leff, JD

Deborah Leff has held a variety of leadership positions in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.  Until recently, she was President and member of the Board of Directors of the Public Welfare Foundation, a national foundation based in Washington, DC focusing on health reform, workers’ rights and criminal and juvenile justice.  Previously, she served as Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; President and CEO of America's Second Harvest (now named "Feeding America"), the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief organization; and President of the Joyce Foundation. Ms. Leff also has held several positions with the federal government, including Trial Attorney with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and Director of Public Affairs at the Federal Trade Commission.

During much of the 1980s and early 1990s, Ms. Leff was Senior Producer at ABC News’ Nightline, World News Tonight and 20/20, where she won numerous national awards, including the Emmy and the DuPont Awards. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the ABIM Foundation and chairs the Board of Directors of StoryCorps.

Ms. Leff received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where she was named a University Scholar. She earned her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Lake Forest College.

Wendy S. Levinson, MD

Dr. Levinson, a board certified internist, is the Sir John and Lady Eaton Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Dr. Levinson is a member of the ABIM Foundation's Board of Trustees and served as the immediate past Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Board of Directors. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Professors of Medicine and a past President of the Society of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Levinson previously served on the faculty of the Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Chicago Medical School.

She is a national and international expert in the field of physician-patient communication and the physician-patient relationship. Her research has spanned a number of highly relevant policy issues, including the relationship of medical malpractice to breakdown in communication, the effectiveness of primary care physicians and surgeons in helping patients to make informed decisions and the relationship of communication to patient satisfaction. Dr. Levinson has contributed to large-scale training programs to enhance the skills of primary care physicians and surgeons in effective communication with their patients. Her current research focus is on the disclosure of medical errors to patients.

After earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, Dr. Levinson earned her medical degree from McMaster University in Ontario.

Elizabeth McGlynn, PhD

Elizabeth McGlynn, PhD, an internationally known expert on methods for evaluating the appropriateness and technical quality of heath care delivery, is Associate Director of RAND Health and holds the RAND Distinguished Chair in Health Care Quality. As Associate Director, she is responsible for strategic development and oversight of the research portfolio and for external dissemination and communications of the findings of RAND Health research. Dr. McGlynn is leading RAND Health’s COMPARE initiative, which is developing a comprehensive method for evaluating health reform proposals. She is also conducting research on the methodological and policy issues associated with implementing measures of efficiency and effectiveness of care at the individual physician level for payment and public reporting.

Dr. McGlynn is a member of the Institute of Medicine and serves on a variety of national advisory committees. She was a member of the Strategic Framework Board that provided a blueprint for the National Quality Forum on the development of a national quality measurement and reporting system and is currently the Vice Chair of the Providence - Little Company of Mary Hospital Service Area Board in Southern California. She serves on the editorial boards for Health Services Research and The Milbank Quarterly.

Dr. McGlynn holds a bachelor’s degree in international political economy from Colorado College, a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and a doctoral degree in public policy from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

John J. Popovich, Jr., MD

Dr. Popovich, a board certified internist and pulmonologist, is President and Chief Executive Officer of Henry Ford Hospital and serves as a professor at Wayne State University's School of Medicine. Dr. Popovich is a member of the ABIM Foundation's Board of Trustees and is its immediate past Chair. He is also the former Chair of the ABIM Board of Directors.

Previously, he served as Senior Vice President of Clinical Affairs and Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Henry Ford. After having started at Henry Ford as the Director of the Medical Intensive Care Unit, Dr. Popovich served as Head of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Division for 10 years. He has been the multiple year recipient of the Henry Ford Hospital Department of Internal Medicine Award for Academic Excellence in Teaching.

He has received Mastership status in the American College of Physicians (ACP), as well as the Laureate Award from ACP's Michigan Chapter. He is a highly respected lecturer and has authored more than 100 publications, abstracts and book chapters and has served as an editorial reviewer for several subspecialty journals. His research interest is the diagnosis of pulmonary thromboembolism.

Dr. Popovich earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan. He completed his residency and fellowship training at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where he served as Chief Medical Resident.

David B. Reuben, MD

Dr. Reuben, who is board certified in internal medicine and geriatric medicine, is Director, Multicampus Program in Geriatrics Medicine and Gerontology and Chief, Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Sciences. He is the Archstone Foundation Chair and Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center. Dr. Reuben, a member of the ABIM Foundation Board of Trustees, is currently Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine and sits on its Executive Committee.

He sustains professional interests in clinical care, education, research and administrative aspects of geriatrics, maintaining a clinical primary care practice of frail older persons and attending on inpatient and geriatric psychiatry units at UCLA. He has won seven awards for excellence in teaching. Dr. Reuben’s current research interests include redesigning the office visit to improve health care quality and measurement of how older adults function. His bibliography includes over 180 peer-reviewed publications in medical journals, 29 books and numerous chapters.

In 2000, Dr. Reuben received the Dennis H. Jahnigen Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to education in the field of geriatrics and in 2008, he received the Joseph T. Freeman Award from the Gerontological Society of America. He was part of the team that received the 2008 John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Award for Research – Joint Commission and National Quality Forum, for Assessing Care of the Vulnerable Elderly. He is a past President of the American Geriatrics Society and the Association of Directors of Geriatric Academic Programs. He is lead author of the widely distributed book Geriatrics at Your Fingertips.

Also a playwright, Dr. Reuben produced Freda Sandrich: Center Stage, a short documentary that was a finalist for a FREDDIE award. His play about decision-making at the end of life, Reprieves, had a reading in Los Angeles in 2007, and two subsequent commissioned readings, by the California Healthcare Foundation in 2008 and by the Friends of the Semel Institute in 2009. His subsequent plays focus on Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and on vaccines and autism. He is currently writing a comedy.

Dr. Reuben received his medical degree from Emory University School of Medicine.

John Rother, JD

John Rother is the Executive Vice President of Policy and Strategy for AARP. He is responsible for the federal and state policies of the Association, and for formulating AARP’s overall strategic direction. He is an authority on Medicare, managed care, long-term care, Social Security, pensions and the challenges facing the boomer generation.

Prior to coming to AARP in 1984, Mr. Rother served eight years with the U.S. Senate as Special Counsel for Labor and health to former Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY), then as Staff Director and Chief Counsel for the Special Committee on Aging under its Chairman, Senator John Heinz (R-PA).

He serves on several boards and commissions, including as the Chair of Generations United, and Vice-Chair of the National Quality Forum. He also serves on the boards of the ABIM Foundation, the Pension Rights Center, the Alliance for Healthcare Reform and advisory boards to Kaiser Permanente, Google and several Congressional fellowships. He is frequently quoted in the news and regularly presents at Congressional conferences and Congressional briefings.

Mr. Rother is an honors graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.