Combiz Abdolrahimi is an attorney, technologist, and former regulator/policymaker with over 14 years of public and private sector experience helping U.S. Federal, State, and international governments, and health agencies. His expertise and experience includes (1) accelerating the adoption and integration of new, innovative, and emerging technologies to increase productivity, efficiency, and positive outcomes to serve the public better and achieve mission impact at scale; and (2) shaping the business, policy, legal, regulatory, ethical, & technical development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, blockchain & distributed ledger technology, 5G/digital & next-generation communication technologies, telemedicine & telehealth technologies, digital identity & access management. He has successfully operationalized & scaled data-driven and technology-powered systems in the U.S. & around the world. 

Combiz has extensive public and private sector innovation expertise, serving as a trusted advisor, lawyer, technologist, policy advisor, & regulator for 3 U.S. Presidents & Cabinet Secretaries at the U.S. Departments of State, Treasury, The White House & U.S. Senate. He has interfaced with C-suite executives & leaders from 100 countries, working in coordination with U.S. leadership to help set policies & priorities, and receiving commendations from Republican & Democratic leadership. He has served on multiple boards and committees, including the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Subcommittee, World Health Organization (Geneva), OECD (Paris) AI & Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board, U.S. Federal Identity Forum, and the U.S. Department of Commerce Trade Finance Advisory Council. Combiz is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2020 Federal 100 Award, nominated by 3 Federal CIOs for his work in driving quality improvement & innovation in the U.S. government. 

Cupid Chan is a seasoned professional who is well-established in the industry. He is a Senior Fellow and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland of a Master program class, “Big Data and AI for Business.” His journey started as one of the key players in building world-class software. Besides holding various technical accreditations, his credential extends into business qualifications such as PMP, Lean Six Sigma, and SAFe Agilist. 

Cupid has been a consultant for years providing solutions to various Fortune 500 companies and Public Sector. He is the Board of Directors, Technical Steering Committee (TSC), and the Chairperson of the BI & AI Project in Linux Foundation ODPi, which committed to simplification & standardization of the big data ecosystem. He regularly publishes best practices and industry standards whitepapers with other industry leaders, including topics like Data Science Notebook Guidelines, “BI”g Data – How Business Intelligence and Big Data come along? and BI Endgame – When AI meets BI. 

He was also the Chairperson of Architecture and Co-Chair of Logical Data Model for The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO), responsible for managing engineering disciplines, providing overall technical direction, and supporting all MISMO Products for the mortgage industry. 

Roni has worked for CMS for over 9 years.  She began her CMS career as the project manager for the Quality Improvement Program.  In that role, she led the User Experience Research for the QIO’s development of the new DARRT tool (a tool used by QIOs to track their contract deliverables). In September 2018, Roni was promoted to Deputy Director of the Division of Service and Infrastructure Fulfillment (DSIF).  She actively supports Stephanie as she leads ISG in promoting the use of HCD through CCSQ and the agency.

Steve Geller is VP of Digital Services for eSimplicity. He has delivered many user-friendly digital products and customer experiences across industries as a product manager and leader during his career. Steve applies Human-Centered Design (HCD) to understand user needs in the service of delivering to the right outcomes. Before eSimplicity, he worked as a product lead for USDS, combining user-centered design with technology to improve government services, on projects in DHS, OPM, DOJ, and CMS. 

Adam has worked for CMS for over 10 years.  In that time he has served as the infrastructure lead for Network, and Physician Quality Reporting System.  In January 2017, Adam was promoted to Deputy Director of the Division of Quality Services and Operations Support.  He then began looking to incorporate User Experience improvements into major projects his team worked on, such as ServiceNow.  In May of 2018, Adam was promoted to Director and changed the name of the division to the Division of Service and Infrastructure Fulfillment (DSIF).  The name change acknowledged the understanding that infrastructure was no longer based on physical datacenters, but more of a consumable service or commodity.  That being said, the design around how those services were deployed and made available, required a significant amount of Human Centered Design (HCD) in order to be fully successful.  Adam continues to support the maturation of the level of HCD beliefs and practices in the Information Systems Group’s work and culture.  

Dr. Rachele Hendricks-Sturrup has been Health Policy Counsel and Lead at the Future of Privacy since October 2019. She holds a Doctor of Health Science, Master of Art in Legal Studies, and Master of Science in Pharmacology and Toxicology. Dr. Hendricks-Sturrup has over 12 years of cumulative experience in healthcare and biomedical research, health journalism, and engagement with digital health companies and startups. Having received mixed-methods research training as a Research Fellow within the Department of Population Medicine (DPM) at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School, she addresses ethical, legal, and social issues at the forefront of health policy and innovation. 

Dr. Hendricks-Sturrup was the first and only Thomas O. Pyle Fellow within the DPM to conduct qualitative semi-structured interviews with ten United States legislators and legislative staff, a research strategy and endeavor rarely pursued or successful across any academic institution. Dr. Hendricks-Sturrup also engages with patient and provider community stakeholders and applies implementation science frameworks to identify and address various policy, legal, ethical, economic, and societal issues at the forefront of precision medicine and develop policy recommendations and best practices. She has published several pieces on the importance of diversity, fairness, and privacy in genomic medicine research in several peer-reviewed journals, media platforms, and books that include but are not limited to Bill of Health, Genetic Literacy Project, New York Times, and DNA Technology. 

As FPF’s health lead, Dr. Hendricks-Sturrup works with stakeholders to advance opportunities for data to be used for research and real-world evidence, improve patient care, and allow patients to access their medical records. She continues to develop FPF’s projects and best practices around genetic data, wearables, and machine learning with health data. 

Dr. Sara R. Jordan is Policy Counsel, Artificial Intelligence and Ethics at the Future of Privacy Forum. Her profile includes privacy implications of data sharing, data and AI review boards, privacy analysis of AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologies, and analysis of AI/ML's ethical challenges. Sara is an active member of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. Before working at FPF, Sara was faculty in the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech (2014-2020) and in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong (2007- 2013). She is a graduate of Texas A&M University and the University of South Florida. 

Harlan Krumholz is a cardiologist, the Director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE), and the Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale University. He is a leading expert in the science to evaluate and improve care quality and efficiency, reduce disparities, improve integrity in medical research, and avoid wasteful practices.  

His team has led successful national and international quality improvement initiatives, architected national quality measures and measurement strategies in partnership with CMS, promoted patient-centric approaches to research and care, created strategy and tools to enable open science and advance scientific integrity, and advanced regulatory science in partnership with the FDA.  

Dr. Krumholz was a founding faculty co-Director of the Yale Center for Research Computing. He co-founded the Yale Open Data Access Project, promoting open science and distributing clinical trial data. He is a co-founder of medRxiv, a non-profit preprint server for the medical and health sciences. He was the founder of the American Heart Association Outcomes Research Council and their Annual Scientific Meeting for Quality of Care and Outcomes Research. He was the founding Editor of the American Heart Association journal, Circulation: Quality of Care and Outcomes. Dr. Krumholz is a co-founder of HugoHealth, a patient-centric platform to engage people as partners in research and clinical care, facilitating interoperability and the secure, permission-based movement of digital health data. He is co-founder of Refactor Health, an enterprise healthcare AI-augmented data management company. Dr. Krumholz has published more than 1000 scientific articles. He was named one of the top-cited scientists, with an h-index of almost 200. He received degrees from Yale College, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. 

Ian Lowrie is an anthropologist of technology and work. His research has focused on developer experience, the sociology of artificial intelligence work, and the ethnographic study of large-scale data handling platforms. Currently, he leads user research on the Hospital Quality Reporting project at CCSQ. Ian holds a doctorate in anthropology from Rice University and has published his academic work in venues such as Cultural Anthropology and Big Data & Society. 

Darryl Marshall, PSM, is Director of Consulting for eSimplicity and SAFe Agile Scrum Master for the CPI Advanced Analytics Advisory contract.  He has both engineered and led predictive and operational data modeling engagements in the Federal Civilian sector since 2011, beginning with the nationally implemented Quick Disability Determination (QDD) and Compassionate Allowance (CAL) modeling engagements for the Social Security Administration.   

For the past four years, Darryl led model development and cloud modernization of the CMS Risk Adjustment Suite of Systems (RASS) for the Medicare Plan Payments Group.  In this capacity, he worked hand-in-hand with CMS data owners, maintainers, and analysts to gain a ground-level understanding of the Medicare Part C provider claims and payments pipeline as CMS modernizes to a cloud-based infrastructure.  Darryl's CMS data experience includes the IDR, CME/BIC, HPMS, FERAS, EDFES, EDPS, RAPS, and EDRA data repositories. 

Keith McFarland is the Sr. V.P. and Chief Innovations Officer of eSimplicity LLC. Living happily in his R.V. with his wife and three kids and driving criss-cross around the country. Keith is one of those unique technical and collaborative individuals with direct leadership experience, including product management, development, delivery, and customer experience. Keith is responsible for delivery and customer satisfaction across eSimplicity programs.

As a creative inventor of multiple patents and recipient of multiple awards from his many clients, Keith has spent his career delivering secure global architecture solutions. Keith leads numerous delivery teams, including agile teams at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS), where he has consulted as the Enterprise (Chief) Architect since 2013. As a passionate technologist and trendsetter, he believes that systems are most successful when focused on the customer experience. 

Edward has over 20 years’ experience as a software developer, enterprise architect, and technology executive – and currently drives special projects in ManTech International’s health division. He focuses on systems of systems engineering (SoSE) practices, human factors engineering, and approaches that bring together clinical, design, engineering, and operational resources to solve multi-disciplinary problems.   

Mr. O’Connor served as the Chief Information Officer and lead architect for an ambitious integrated delivery system (IDS) effort in Austin, Texas, to bring together primary care clinics, a hospital system, and a startup non-profit health plan, dozens of community service providers, and the Dell Medical School. He also led the independent cloud-migration tiger team and performance testing team for CMS’s Healthcare.gov program and stood up a proof-of-concept for synthetic data creation for large-scale traffic simulation. Edward recently joined a project for the Veteran Administration’s Office of Technical Integration as the lead architect guiding a group of subject matter experts focused on measuring and improving large-scale system interoperability. 

Although stationary (in Denver, Colorado) right now – Edward and his family once dispensed with all possessions that did not fit in an Airstream trailer and a pickup truck – and spent over two years traveling the country while working on technology projects (mostly) full-time.

Christina Schilstra is a Tantus Product Manager with over 22 years of experience in healthcare IT. She has held positions in software programming, marketing, marketing support, product management, product operations, and, most recently, for Tantus, developing artificial intelligence proofs-of-concept for CMS. Her experience includes working on market-leading hospital information and scheduling systems, radiology management systems, CMS quality measure analytics solutions, remote patient monitoring, healthcare insurance processing, and machine learning and natural language processing of unstructured data.  

Most recently, she trained seven machine learning models to derive insights from CMS eRulemaking and Listening Session data. She has developed solutions in both waterfall and scaled agile environments and has built both server-based and cloud-based solutions. As Product Manager, she grew revenues in one company from $3 million to $21 million and increased customers from 40 to 200 over six years. She saved another company over half a million dollars per year by identifying and implementing a data interface between systems, thereby eliminating manual data entry and errors, and increasing data quality. She has a husband and two grown children and loves cooking, gardening, and taking long walks. 

Bin Shao holds a Ph.D. degree from Iowa State University and has worked in university, research lab, and trading firm settings; he has a broad spectrum of expertise in image processing, information and cybersecurity, blockchain and cryptocurrency trading; he specializes in using computer vision and deep reinforcement learning technologies to solve real-world problems. His work involves computer network intrusion detection that proactively generates alerts for suspicious activities, a complete computer vision pipeline to analyze animal behaviors and control environment, and a smart user authentication model for autonomous vehicles using ECG signals. He has a deep understanding of the latest advances in AI and machine learning research. He likes jokes and reading and while he is not coding, you will find him walking puppies.

Stephanie Warren is a UX Content Strategist with 20+ years focused on creating engaging digital experiences. From her days at AOL in the Relationship Marketing department to her years as the Director of Digital Strategy at an eCommerce agency, she always loved seeing how great creativity can get people to respond. She is the lead strategist on Hospital Quality Reporting at CCSQ and is obsessed with uncovering ways to reduce government systems' friction.

Stephanie believes that Artificial Intelligence will become extremely important to the future's content strategies, and she is excited to see these advances start to become a reality.