Speaker Bios

Maureen Bisognano

Maureen is the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).

Prior to joining IHI, Ms. Bisognano was Senior Vice President of the Juran Institute, where she consulted with senior leaders worldwide on strategy and improvement in health care settings. Before that, she served as Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Respiratory Hospital in Braintree, Massachusetts for Quorum Health Resources. 

Since 1990, Ms. Bisognano has served on the boards of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, the Lean Enterprise Institute, the National Initiative for Children’s Health Care Quality, the Center for Health Design, the American Society for Quality, and the National Center for Healthcare Leadership. She currently serves on the board of the Luther Midelfort Clinic, is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, and since 2005 has been a member of the Commonwealth Fund’s Commission on a High Performance Health System. 

Ms. Bisognano has been a Course Director and Instructor in Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1997. In 2007 she was appointed as an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate in the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Maureen began her career in health care in 1973 as a staff nurse at Quincy City Hospital.  She was Director of Nursing at Quincy City Hospital from 1981-1982, Director of Patient Services from 1982-1986 and Chief Operating Officer from 1986-1987. Ms. Bisognano holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of the State of New York, and a Master of Science degree from Boston University.

Eugene Litvak, Ph.D.

Eugene is President and CEO of the newly created Institute for Healthcare Optimization. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Operations Management in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), where he teaches the course “Operations Management in Service Delivery Organizations”. He is a co-founder (with Michael C. Long, MD) and director of the Program for the Management of Variability in Health Care Delivery at the Boston University (BU) Health Policy Institute and a Professor at the BU School of Management. Before joining Boston University Dr. Litvak was a faculty member at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. Dr. Litvak arrived in the U.S. in 1988, and joined HSPH in 1990 after being chief of the Operations Management Group at the Computing Center in Kiev, Ukraine.

His research interests include operations management in health care delivery organizations, cost-effective medical decision-making, screening for HIV and other infectious diseases, and operations research. Professor Litvak is an author of more than 60 publications in these areas. He was the leading author of the innovative cost-effective protocols in screening for HIV and hepatitis, which reduce the cost of screening by a factor of 5 to 10 while simultaneously reducing errors by a factor of 20 to 40. These protocols have been positively evaluated by FDA, NIH and CDC, were the subject of a large-scale international trial supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as Chiron and Roche pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Litvak served as a Principal Investigator from the U.S. for this trial.

Since 1995 he has led the development and practical application of the innovative Variability Methodology (introduced by him and Dr. Long) for cost reduction and quality improvement in health care delivery systems. Application of this methodology has resulted in significant quality improvement and multimillion dollar improvements in the margins for every hospital that has applied Variability Methodology. Dr. Litvak was the Principal Investigator in the "Emergency Room Diversion Study" supported by the grant from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee “The Future of Emergency Care in the United States Health System“. He is a member of the "National Advisory Committee to the American Hospital Association for Improving Quality, Patient Safety and Performance" and also Principal Investigator in many hospital operations improvement projects. Dr. Litvak frequently presents as an invited lecturer at many national and international meetings. He also serves as a consultant on operations improvement to several major hospitals and is a faculty of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Glenn D. Steele Jr., M.D., Ph.D.

Glenn Steele is President and Chief Executive Officer of Geisinger Health System. Dr. Steele previously served as the dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine and as vice president for medical affairs at the University of Chicago, as well as the Richard T. Crane Professor in the Department of Surgery. Prior to that, he was the William V. McDermott Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, president and chief executive officer of Deaconess Professional Practice Group, Boston, MA, and chairman of the department of surgery at New England Deaconess Hospital (Boston, MA). Widely recognized for his investigations into the treatment of primary and metastatic liver cancer and colorectal cancer surgery, Dr. Steele is past Chairman of the American Board of Surgery. He serves on the editorial board of numerous prominent medical journals. His investigations have focused on the cell biology of gastrointestinal cancer and pre-cancer and most recently on innovations in healthcare delivery and financing. A prolific writer, he is the author or co-author of more than 460 scientific and professional articles.

Dr. Steele received his bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard University and his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. He completed his internship and residency in surgery at the University of Colorado, where he was also a fellow of the American Cancer Society. He earned his PhD in microbiology at Lund University in Sweden. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and serves on their Committee on Reviewing Evidence to Identify Highly Effective Clinical Services (HECS), the New England Surgical Society, a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the American Surgical Association, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and past president of the Society of Surgical Oncology. He was a member of the National Advisory Committee for Rural Health, the Pennsylvania Cancer Control Consortium and is presently a member of the Healthcare Executives Network, the Alliance for Advancing Non-profit Health Care, the Commonwealth Fund’s Commission on a High Performance Health System, and he serves as a member of the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s (NCQA) Committee on Performance Measurement. In addition, Dr. Steele was Chair for the American Hospital Association Systems Governing Council and now serves on the AHA Long-Range Policy Committee. He is currently Honorary Chair of the Pennsylvania March of Dimes Prematurity Campaign. Dr. Steele serves on several boards including Bucknell University’s Board of Trustees, Temple University School of Medicine’s Board of Visitors, the American Hospital Association’s Board of Trustees, Premier, Inc., the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Healthcare Leadership Council, the HFMA Healthcare Leadership Council, the Northeast Regional Cancer Institute, the Global Conference Institute, and previously served on the Simon School of Business Advisory Board (University of Rochester) 2002 - 2007.

In 2006 Dr. Steele received the CEO IT Achievement Award, given by Modern Healthcare and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for promoting health information technology. In 2007, Dr. Steele received AHA’s Grassroots Champion Award and was named to Modern Healthcare’s 50 Most Powerful Physician Executives in Healthcare.