Professor Adam Elshaug, B.A., B.Sc. (Hons), M.P.H., Ph.D., is Director of the Centre for Health Policy (MSPGH) with joint Chair appointments in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (MSPGH) and Melbourne Medical School (MMS).

He is a researcher and policy advisor specialising in measuring and reducing waste (e.g. low-value care) to optimize value in health care, an area in which he has developed novel, award winning methods utilising administrative health data.

Adam works closely with national and state governments, and third party payers to design and implement reforms to reduce waste and optimise health care safety and value, including the design and evaluation of alternative models of care and payment. He sits on numerous national and international committees, including most recently as a Ministerial appointee to the Medicare Benefits Schedule Review Taskforce and its Principles and Rules Sub-Committee. Currently he is a Board Member of the New South Wales (NSW) Bureau of Health Information (BHI) which reports on the performance of the NSW public health system, a member of the Health Services Principal Advisory Committee for Cancer Council Australia, on the Expert Advisory Committee for Evidence-based Interventions (NICE, NHS England and NHS Improvement). Since 2014 he has been economic and policy advisor to Cancer Australia.

Adam was a 2010-11 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow based at the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). From mid-2011 to mid-2013, he then served as NHMRC Sidney Sax Fellow in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy. In parallel, he became The Commonwealth Fund’s Inaugural Visiting Fellow for 2012-13 in New York. To 2017 he was an elected Member of the Executive Committee of the Health Services Research Association of Australia and NZ (HSRAANZ). For 2019-20 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Economics Studies’ USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy at The Brookings Institution in Washington DC.

From 2013-2020 Adam was based at the University of Sydney, in 2016 becoming Co-Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. He is recipient of numerous research awards and over 200 invitations to address conferences, government, academic, insurance and health technology assessment groups internationally. He has collaborated to attract over $125 million in research funding and published approximately 170 technical reports and peer reviewed articles with first-author publications in journals including The Lancet (co-lead of the 2017 Right Care series), NEJM, BMJ, JAMA, MJA, among others.

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Dr. Paul Hattis, a physician-attorney, has joined the Lown Institute as a Senior Fellow, after retiring recently from his role as Senior Associate Director of the MPH Program at Tufts University Medical School and a member of the faculty in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine.   

With a strong interest in state health care policy, Dr. Hattis currently co-hosts, with colleague John McDonough of the Harvard School of Public Health, “Health or Consequences” a podcast focused on Massachusetts public health and health care policy issues under the sponsorship of Commonwealth Magazine. Dr. Hattis also currently is an active opinion writer for Commonwealth, writing on a variety of state health care and higher ed policy topics.  

Over many years, Paul’s policy-oriented research efforts have focused on the issues of hospital accountability to communities, and on efforts to advance consumer advocacy on health care costs and system affordability. Dr. Hattis, was appointed in 2012 as the inaugural Consumer Advocate board member on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission. And in 2018, Massachusetts Attorney General Healey appointed Dr. Hattis to a task group that helped to revise the Massachusetts community benefit guidelines for hospitals and health plans.

Prior to his joining Tufts University, Dr. Hattis served for 5 years as the Senior Medical Advisor to the Department of Community Benefit Programs of the Partners Healthcare System of Boston, MA. In his capacity at Partners, Dr. Hattis worked with staff from Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, other affiliated hospitals and neighborhood community health centers to support systematic efforts to improve primary care and public health delivery in the neighborhoods of Boston. 

Previously, he was Vice President of Medical Affairs at the Carney Hospital of Boston, a senior research professor in the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and deputy director of the Hospital Community Benefit Standards Program (HCBSP), a W.K. Kellogg Foundation sponsored initiative. Dr. Hattis received his medical and law degrees from the University of Illinois where he was part of the Medical Scholars Program. He also received a Masters of Public Health degree from UCLA and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Michigan. Dr. Hattis is board certified in Public Health and Preventive Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Preventive Medicine. He is the co-author of two books, and a number of articles related to his academic areas of interest.

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Patrick Chen is a geospatial data scientist and health economist that has led numerous population health and data science teams in organizations ranging from community health systems to Fortune 5 entities. He specializes in addressing community & population needs by integrating clinical, financial, social, and geospatial dimensions to produce holistic views of patients and communities. Patrick is deeply committed to driving a positive, structural impact in underserved communities for both clinical outcomes and social determinants through the thoughtful execution of data-driven population health programs and community-sensitive approaches. 

Currently, Patrick is a Senior Director of Business Intelligence for Scripps Health where he leads a team of data scientists and clinicians to quantify access to care issues, develop healthcare economics studies, and pursue market intelligence endeavors. Previously, Patrick served as an Associate Director of Healthcare Economics at Optum/UnitedHealth Group and as a Manager of Data Science & Population Health Intelligence for Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Healthcare. In these roles, Patrick led the research and development of formal spatiotemporal and economic analyses of communities and patient populations to restructure population health strategies with the intention of improving access to care and lifting community health outcomes. This has led to successful program launches such as integrated behavioral health models, food prescription programs, and reducing unnecessary medical expenditures. His approach to data science and population health intelligence has been featured in organizations such as the Advisory Board and the Chief Data Officer Magazine.

Patrick received his Master of Applied Science degree in Spatial Analytics from Johns Hopkins University and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Health Policy from the University of California, Irvine.

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Dr. Adam Gaffney, M.D. M.P.H. is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a health policy researcher, and a writer and commentator on issues of medicine and policy.

His research focuses on national healthcare reform, healthcare equity, and disparities in lung health.  He has authored or co-authored more than 60 journal articles, with first-author publications in such journals as the Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, British Medical Journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, and elsewhere.  He is also the author of the book To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History, published in 2017 by Routledge.

A past-president of the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), Dr. Gaffney is also a frequent writer on matters of healthcare and policy, and has published articles in outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, New Republic, USA Today, and the Boston Globe.  He is also a frequent media guest, and has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, Fox Business News, the BBC, and elsewhere.

Dr. Gaffney received his MD from New York University and his MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  He completed his residency at the Columbia University Medical Center, where he served as chief resident, and his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Woman’s Hospital, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  

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