Dr. Kohler’s legacy of leadership at OHSU, the state’s third-largest employer, cannot go unnoticed. His eighteen-year tenure as president helped catapult the institution to a free-standing corporation and expanded its research funding nearly seven-fold to $274 million a year. He has also been a long-time proponent of Area Health Education Centers, which seek to improve health care in underserved, particularly rural, areas. Dr. Kohler currently splits his time between Oregon and Arkansas, where he is leading efforts to create a satellite campus of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Fayetteville.

David Ford has been President and CEO of CareOregon, a non-profit managed care plan serving Oregon Health Plan members, since 2003. Under his vision, the organization moved quickly from financial doom to being the largest Medicaid managed care organization with, now, 90,000 members. Ford has held health care leadership roles for more than twenty years; before taking over the reins of CareOregon, he worked for a large HMO in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.

Dr. Tina Castañares is Medical Director for Hospice of The Gorge and Family Physician at La Clínica del Cariño. She has worked for over twenty years providing care and leadership to Oregon’s communities.  An original member of the Oregon Health Services Commission, she assisted in the pioneering work which made possible the Oregon Health Plan.  For 12 years, Dr. Castañares was the Health Officer for Hood River County and for 11 years the National Ombudswoman for Farmworker Health to the U.S. Assistant Surgeon General.

Keynote Speaker:

Paul Ginsburg is President of the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). Founded in 1995, HSC conducts research to inform policymakers and other audiences about changes in organization of financing and delivery of care and their effects on people. Data are gathered through the Community Tracking Study, which includes surveys of households and physicians and site visits to interview health system leaders in 12 communities that are representative of the nation. HSC is widely known for the objectivity and technical quality of its research and its success in communicating it to policy makers and the media as well as to the research community. A sister organization to Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., HSC is funded principally by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, but also receives funding from other foundations and from government agencies. To learn more about HSC, please visit its web site: www.hschange.org.

Dr. Ginsburg served as the founding Executive Director of the Physician Payment Review Commission (now the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission). Widely regarded as highly influential, the Commission developed the Medicare physician payment reform proposal that was enacted by the Congress in 1989. Dr. Ginsburg was a Senior Economist at RAND and served as Deputy Assistant Director at the Congressional Budget Office. Before that, he served on the faculties of Duke and Michigan State Universities. He earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard University.