I3PI Leadership | Experts in Healthcare Quality Improvement

Leadership

Optimizing quality and service delivery one practice and provider at a time

I3PI is a public benefit corporation devoted to helping healthcare professionals and organizations provide higher quality and more cost-effective care

Saul J. Weiner, MD

Founder and Principal

Saul Weiner is a board certified internist and pediatrician with practice, leadership, and research experience in a variety of health care settings. He has served as a residency program director, academic division head, clinic director, medical education dean, and health services investigator. He has served as a principal or co-investigator of studies of health systems improvement, health surveys, medical decision making and provider communication funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Veterans Administration. Over the last 10 years he has focused on developing and refining methods for assessing health care quality based on direct observation to enhance value based care. A particular focus has been on helping practices and providers prevent costly “contextual errors” that occur when clinicians and health care teams overlook barriers patients’ face that undermine otherwise appropriate care plans.

Alan Schwartz, PhD, JD

Founder and Principal

Alan Schwartz is a cognitive psychologist with expertise in medical decision making, organizational behavior, and measurement with over a decade of experience evaluating and training health care providers to improve quality. His research in medical decision making and evidence-based medicine has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the National Board of Medical Examiners, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the journals Medical Decision Making and Medical Decision Making Policy & Practice.

Alan H. Spiro, MD, MBA

Principal

Alan Spiro is a healthcare leader with over 30 years of experience in bringing innovative ideas into operational reality. Currently, Dr. Spiro works with a small number of cutting-edge companies to help them with clinical, analytic, marketing, management, and operational strategies. Until very recently, Alan was SVP for Strategy and Analytics and Chief Medical Officer for Blue Health Intelligence, developing data science solutions based on the 100 million life database of the Blue Cross plans around the country. He is an expert in the interface between patient care, data science, and operations with a special interest in new approaches made into reality by new business creation. His background includes having been Chief Medical Officer at Medica, a health services company, and co-founder, Senior Vice President, and Chief Medical Officer of Accolade, Inc., an on-demand healthcare concierge for employers, health plans, and health systems that he grew from 7 employees to 700 and where he spearheaded the development of health advocacy programs that significantly improved health outcomes, resulting in substantial cost savings and clinical quality improvement. Alan served as Vice President, Chief Medical Officer National Accounts at Anthem, Inc. and prior to that was a Partner and leader of the Clinician Section of the Health Management Practice at Towers Perrin (now Willis Towers Watson) serving the Fortune 500 employers. He was a founder of AIM, now owned by Anthem. He received his MD from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His clinical training included a joint MIT Harvard Research Fellowship in Nutrition at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a Harvard Clinical Fellowship in Gastroenterology at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, as well as a University of Chicago Affiliated Residency in Internal Medicine.

Amy Binns-Calvey

Standardized patient coordinator

Amy Binns-Calvey oversees all aspects of the training and oversight of our actors in the field. To date she has overseen over 300 (and counting) unannounced visits in the field to dozens of physicians and practices throughout Chicago and Milwaukee. She extensively trains and supervises standardized patients in the educational, testing and research arenas. Amy brings 30 years of professional theater experience (including directing an off-Broadway production) to her with standardized patients. She has been an instructor and program designer for The Art Institute of Chicago’s Young Artists Studios and an Illinois Arts Roster artist in residence. Her proficiency with improvisational techniques uniquely qualifies her for training SPs to remain undetected during unannounced encounters. Amy has first-hand experience as an unannounced SP, working undercover.

Gunjan Sharma

Project Manager

Gunjan Sharma oversees and coordinates projects, working closely with our clients to assure seamless communication. She has extensive experience setting up unannounced standardized patient visits in numerous health settings ranging from small group practices to large hospital clinics and clinic networks. She has served as a the project director of a large federally funded studying involving nearly 400 unannounced standardized visits to over 100 physicians and practices throughout the Midwest. Previously, she served as a research associate conducting studies on safety across high consequence industries, including aviation, with an emphasis on safety culture in high reliability organizations. Gunjan has a Ph.D in Business Commerce and Industrial Psychology from the University of Jammu, India.

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