To support the theme of critical issues of different healthcare systems, presentations will be made about the key drivers of the German healthcare system the Italian healthcare system and the US healthcare system. In addition, special guest presenters will cover important areas including project management for healthcare, e-health initiatives in the EU and US healthcare environments as well as barriers and facilitators in R&D and BioTech.

Learning Outcomes:

By understanding the key drivers for any healthcare system including financial and technological as well as the critical issues of various healthcare systems it is anticipated that attendees will leave the workshop better equipped to grapple with the challenges facing healthcare delivery and most importantly where solution strategies lie.

Dr Christian Fegeler
Hospitalvereinigung St Marien, Colonge, Germany Berufsakademie Heidenheim, University of Cooperative Education (UCE)

Dr Fegeler is head of Corporate Development at the Hospitalvereinigung St.Marien GmbH Köln and responsible for the coordination of 4 hospitals in the city of Cologne, Germany. Dr. Fegeler practised as physician several years before he decided to switch to the management of health care institutions. His expertise includes management of hospitals and IT strategies for hospitals. Additionally Dr. Fegeler is lecturer at the UCE in Heidenheim, where he teaches business process engineering for hospitals and quality assurance.

Professor Elie Geisler, PhD
Stuart School of Business, IIT
Chicago

Eliezer (Elie) Geisler is Distinguished University Professor at the Stuart School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology and Director of IIT Center for the Management of Medical Technology. He holds a doctorate from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Dr. Geisler is the author of nearly 100 papers in the areas of technology and innovation management, the evaluation of R&D, science and technology, and the management of healthcare and medical technology. He is the author of several books, including: Managing the Aftermath of Radical Corporate Change (1997), The Metrics of Science and Technology (2000), also translated into Chinese, Creating Value with Science and Technology (2001), Technology, Healthcare and Management in the Hospital of the Future (2003), and Installing and Managing Workable Knowledge Management Systems (With Rubenstein, 2003). He consulted for major corporations and for many U.S. federal departments, such as Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, EPA, Energy, and NASA. Dr. Geisler is the co-founder of the annual conferences on the Hospital of the Future, and the Health Care Technology and Management Association, a joint venture of several universities in 10 countries. He serves on various editorial boards

Professor Gerald Hoffman, PhD
The Gerald Hoffman Company, LLC Chicago

Gerald Hoffman is a consultant, an educator, and an author. His fields of expertise are general management and technology management. He has done pioneering work in helping organizations get value from their investments in information technology. In his role as consultant, he has been advisor/mentor to the CIO of a major advertising agency and to the CIO of a medium sized metropolitan daily newspaper. He has recently advised the CIO of a large public utility on issues of organization, business process, and integration of a large acquisition He is an adjunct professor at IIT, and has been an adjunct professor at Northwestern University.

Professor Andreas Mahr, PhD
Berufsakademie Heidenheim, University of Cooperative Education (UCE), Germany

Dr Mahr is vice president of the UCE and dean of Engineering. He formerly was head of the department of Medical Information Management at UCE. His expertise includes software applications, IT strategies and Open Source operating systems.

Professor Giuseppe Turchetti, PhD
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Pisa, ITALY

Giuseppe Turhcetti is Associate Professor in Economics and Management at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where he got his PhD in Economics and Management. His research activity focuses on the problems related to the organization, financing and evaluation of health care services and medical technologies. He has spent several research periods as Visiting Scholar at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) and he is Aggregate Scholar of the Centre on Management of Medical Technology of the Stuart Graduate School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. Founder and Director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center "European Transplantation Management Research Centre" of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, he serves as reviewer for scientific Journals and international Publishers in the field of economics and management of healthcare and health care technologies. Author of scientific papers and book chapters in national and international journals, he has written two books and edited 6 books.

Professor Nilmini Wickramasinghe, PhD
Stuart School of Business, IIT Chicago

Nilmini Wickramasinghe researches and teaches in several areas within information systems including knowledge management, e-commerce and m-commerce, and organizational impacts of technology with particular focus on the applications of these areas to healthcare and thereby effecting superior healthcare delivery. She is particularly dedicated to the area of utilizing ICT (information communication technologies) to enable superior healthcare delivery at the IIT Centre for the Management of Medical Technology as the associate director. She is well published with more than 50 referred scholarly articles and several books. In addition, she regularly presents her work throughout North America, as well as in Europe and Australia. Dr. Wickramasinghe is the U.S. representative of the Health Care Technology Management Association (HCTM), an international organization that focuses on critical healthcare issues and the role of technology within the domain of healthcare. She is the associate director of the Center for the Management of Medical Technologies (CMMT), a unique research-oriented center with key research foci on knowledge management, healthcare, and the confluence of these domains and holds an associate professor position at the Stuart School of Business, IIT. In addition, Dr Wickramasinghe is the editor-in-chief of two scholarly journals: International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations (IJNVO - www.inderscience.com/ijnvo ) and International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology (IJBET-www.inderscience.com/ijbet).

JoAnn Becker, MS, MBA, PMP
TransformingHealthcare.com Chicago

JoAnn Becker is founder and Managing Partner of TransformingHealthcare.com, a consortium of expertise to improve, grow, and change healthcare organizations. Known as the Healthcare Executive’s Project Manager, Ms Becker has a 20+ year track record of delivering organizational results from technology and project. She has led all functional areas within IT, been a product manager, and held various roles in consulting, and developed the SPOTT® gap analysis for the healthcare environment to ensure successful results. She has taught in several graduate university programs, the U. S. Navy, and the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services. She was the first project manager for the Certification Commission on Health Information Technology (CCHIT), and coauthored “Enterprise Project Management is Key for Success” in the HIMSS international journal. Recently asked to review an upcoming book on disruptive innovations in healthcare, she is a frequent speaker on change leadership skills in healthcare. Ms. Becker holds the international project management certification through the Project Management Institute, an MBA from the University of Chicago, MS in Judicial Administration from the University of Denver College of Law, and BS with Honors from the University of Wisconsin with majors in Mathematics and Education.

Gary Keller, MsB
CEO of Xomix Ltd., a Chicago-base company engaged in biotechnology businesses development, the commercialization of bio-innovations, and the design and implementation on strategic initiatives. He currently oversees Workforce Development and Strategic Initiatives for the Chicago Technology Park. Keller is founding CEO and serves as a board member of ZelleRx Corporation, a San Diego based biopharmaceutical company developing cancer treatment products based its proprietary natural killer (NK) cell line, NK-92. He has more than 20 years of experience in business development for leading biotechnology companies including corporate development, product development, market development, sales, and scientific research and development. He is known as an international speaker on the topics of marketing genetic therapies, commercialization of technologies, virtual incubation of companies, biotechnology led economic development, technology evaluation, technical sales and marketing development. Keller is adjunct faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology, Stuart Graduate School of Business - Management of Medical Technology and the University of Illinois at Chicago, BioEngineering.

Fred Pira
Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of ProNex, Inc. since 2001, has a career that spans over 20 years of successful sales, sales management, marketing, business development and channel management experience. His mission is to drive the company's global leadership in the IT business consulting and managed services markets with innovative offerings, including My ProConnect, the web enabled tool for health professionals and their patients/clients. He holds a Master of Management degree from North Park University, Chicago, Illinois, and also maintains certificates in Marketing of Services and Organizational Development.

Tom Foth
Pitney Bowes - Research Fellow

Currently, Tom is one of the on-loan resources to the Dossia Consortium and serves there as the Dossia product manager and has been involved in software and systems development for the past 32 years. His experience spans from large mainframe systems development for a Fortune 10 company to distributed state government health and welfare systems down to embedded systems for data communications. He has led development for software vendors in the areas of data communications and collaborative work environments. Immediately prior to joining Pitney Bowes, Tom invented, developed, and brought to market a high-speed optical network connection between mainframes and file servers.

At Pitney Bowes, Tom has been involved in a diverse set of assignments including the development of an Internet micropayment system, Internet postage payment systems, and remote check imaging systems. In 2004, Tom was among a group of seven inventors named by Pitney Bowes as Inventors of the Year for his work on a patent covering Internet based postage payments used by eBay. In 2006 Tom was again named co-Inventor of the Year for his permit postage payment system. Tom has been granted 21 patents and has over 40 pending.