Advisory Committee

Ivo Abraham, PhD, a nurse by profession and an outcomes and effectiveness researcher by trade, is a professor of Pharmacy and Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Health Outcomes and PharmacoEconomic Research, the Arizona Cancer Center, and the Center for Applied Genomics and Genetic Medicine. Dr. Abraham has served as a regular or visiting professor at universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He currently serves as the associate editor for quantitative methods for JAMA Dermatology, and has co-authored more than 350 articles, 75 chapters, and 30 books and monographs.

Dr. Abraham’s research program has been funded continuously since 1984 by governmental agencies, foundations, and corporations worldwide. In the U.S., he has served as an appointed and ad hoc reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute for Mental Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Veterans Administration. He has also been an expert advisor to the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a joint undertaking of the European Union and the biopharmaceutical industry, to stimulate innovation in human therapeutics.

A native of Belgium, he received his BS (psychiatric nursing) from the Catholic University of Leuven and his MS (psychiatric-mental health nursing) and PhD (clinical research) from the University of Michigan.

Vicki is a Senior IT Director of Revenue Cycle Systems at Texas Oncology, where she leads the revenue cycle application support team. The team’s applications include practice management systems, mobile rounding, telemedicine, referral management, appointment reminders, and others. Texas Oncology is a community-based cancer treatment group with more than 210 locations and 490 physicians throughout Texas and southeastern Oklahoma.

Vicki has worked in healthcare for 34 years in a variety of roles, including revenue cycle, practice leadership, sales, and IT. Vicki helped start the telehealth initiative at Texas Oncology in 2016. Texas Oncology now averages 4,000 telehealth visits per week.

Keola K. Beale, MD, is a board-certified hematology and oncology specialist in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Beale was inspired to become an oncologist after losing both his father and grandfather to cancer during his medical training. An avid researcher, he participates in Kaiser Permanente's large oncology clinical trials program. He strives to communicate with his patients in an informative and empathetic manner, treating every patient as he would a loved one.

He received his medical degree at University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, California.

Teri Bedard is the Executive Director of Client & Corporate Resources with Revenue Cycle Coding Strategies (RCCS). With more than 20 years of medical experience, Teri has served as the senior and staff radiation therapist at renowned oncology practices across the Midwest. During her tenure with RCCS, Teri has served as Senior Consultant, Remote Solutions Manager, and Director of Client Services. At RCCS, Teri advises and leads clients in billing and reimbursement for technology, monitoring government regulatory information and seeking new business opportunities.

Teri earned her BA at the University of Northern Iowa; completed her radiologic technology certificate at Mayo School for Health-Related Sciences in Rochester, MN; and earned a certificate in radiation therapy from Fairview University Medical Center in Minneapolis, MN. Teri is certified as a professional coder through the American Academy of Professional Coders.

Matthew Bouchonville, MD, is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism. He serves as the Medical Director of the UNM Diabetes Comprehensive Care Center and the UNM Center for Diabetes and Nutrition Education. Dr. Bouchonville is an Associate Director of Project ECHO and Medical Director of the Endocrinology teleECHO (Endo ECHO) program at the ECHO Institute. In 2014, he launched the Endo ECHO program to build expertise about complex diabetes management within the primary care workforce in medically underserved regions in New Mexico. In his role as Associate Director of Project ECHO, he joined the Cancer Initiative in 2019 and the COVID-19 initiative in 2020.

Becky Bounds, MSN, RN-BC, CPHQ, is Program Manager for TexLa Telehealth Resource Center, a division of the Institute for Rural and Community Health at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Becky earned her masters degree in nursing at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Nursing. In addition to clinical nursing experience in multiple settings, Becky has 18 years of experience in ambulatory healthcare quality, compliance, and informatics and is now dedicated to advancing telehealth, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Becky holds certifications in informatics nursing and healthcare quality.

Gary Doolittle, MD, is the Capitol Federal Masonic Professor of Medicine in the Division of Oncology and Hematology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Westwood, Kansas, where he is also Medical Director of the Midwest Cancer Alliance, vice-chair of education in the Department of Internal Medicine, and Assistant Dean for the Office of Medical Education. Dr. Doolittle has written many journal articles, books, and book chapters on a range of oncology topics, with a major emphasis on telemedicine. He is a member of the American College of Physicians, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society of Hematology, the Southwest Oncology Group, and the Board of Directors of the Midwest Melanoma Partnership. Dr. Doolittle earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he also completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in hematology/oncology.

Brian Dunn is a Unified Communications Engineer and Tele-Oncology Specialist for the Karen S. Rheuban Center for Telehealth at UVA Health. He develops programs within oncology to extend the effectiveness of care for some of our most vulnerable populations using a wide variety of telehealth tools.

John Edwards, MD, is the Co-Medical Director of Indiana Blood & Marrow Transplantation (IBMT), specializing in hematologic malignancies and stem cell transplantation. He is the past president of the Indiana Oncology Society. Prior to joining IBMT, Dr. Edwards was the founding director of the Florida Center for Cellular Therapy at Florida Hospital, the first BMT program in Central Florida. He has previously worked in industry as the President/COO/CMO of Lifeforce Cryobanks and as Medical Director at CTI Clinical Trial and Consulting. Dr. Edwards attended medical school at the University of Florida and then trained in pediatrics and immunology and hematology/oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. He also served on the faulty at Vanderbilt University.

Sandra L. Kane-Gill, PharmD, MSc, FCCM, FCCP, is Professor of Pharmacy and Therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. She has secondary appointments in the School of Medicine in the Clinical Translational Science Institute, Department of Critical Care Medicine, and Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Kane-Gill is also a professor in the Center for Critical Care Nephrology and Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing.

In addition to her academic appointments, Dr. Kane-Gill is a Critical Care Medication Safety Pharmacist at UPMC in the Department of Pharmacy. Her research focuses on effective approaches for the detection, prevention, and management of medication errors and adverse drug events. She has successfully incorporated health information technology (clinical decision support, telemedicine) in practice to advance healthcare systems by ensuring better safety and quality of care. She served as the principal investigator for an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grant to transform the medication regimen review process by incorporating clinical decision support alerts and telemedicine to reduce adverse drug events. Dr. Kane-Gill has presented her work at several professional meetings, and she has published more than 200 articles and book chapters related to critical care and patient safety.

Karen Kayser, PhD, MSW, is Professor Emerita at the University of Louisville, Kent School of Social Work. There she held the Dr. Renato LaRocca Endowed Chair in Oncology Social Work, and in 2012 she established the first graduate program in the nation in psychosocial oncology. Her clinical research has focused on the development and testing of couple-based interventions for cancer patients and the improvement of psychosocial care delivery in cancer programs. Her current research focuses on the promotion of cervical cancer prevention and HPV vaccination in rural Kentucky communities using the ECHO Model® of tele-mentoring. Her international work includes a Fulbright fellowship in Chennai, India (2018), where her work focused on building clinical research capacity in psycho-oncology. Dr. Kayser serves as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology.

Nikesh Kotecha, PhD, currently serves as Vice President of Informatics at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI). He leads informatics efforts to realize the institute’s mission to accelerate the development of breakthrough immune therapies and turn cancer into a curable disease. Dr. Kotecha’s focus on delivering computational and molecular technologies to the healthcare community drives him to work at the intersection of medicine, informatics, entrepreneurship, and education.

Prior to joining PICI, Dr. Kotecha was the CEO & Co-founder of Cytobank Inc. (part of Danaher Life Sciences), an analytics company that builds solutions around single-cell proteomics and cytometry, two technologies that are revolutionizing how we understand disease mechanisms. Dr. Kotecha is also a consulting faculty member in the Computational and Systems Immunology Program at Stanford University and an advisor at StartXMed, a Stanford startup accelerator.

Dr. Kotech earned a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford University and a BS in biomedical engineering from Boston University. He has more than 15 years of experience building analytic applications to address scientific and informatics problems in healthcare.

Mei Wa Kwong, JD has over two decades of experience in state and federal policy work.  She is the Executive Director for the Center for Connected Health Policy (CCHP), the federally designated National Telehealth Policy Resource Center.  She has written numerous policy briefs, crafted state legislation and led several coalition efforts on a variety of issues and assisted states in their telehealth efforts, particularly in Medicaid and public health.

Ms. Kwong is recognized as a national expert on telehealth policy.  She helped create the model statute language that became the basis of the 2011 California state legislation that updated California telehealth law, published several articles on telehealth and telehealth policy in various peer reviewed journals and is the co-author of CCHP’s 50 State Medicaid Telehealth Reimbursement Survey.  She has been consulted by state and federal lawmakers on telehealth legislation and policy and is sought out by the media to provide insight on telehealth issues.  Ms. Kwong is a sought-after speaker who has spoken to a variety of audiences including health industry executives, physicians, journalists, attorneys and various national organizations.

Prior to joining CCHP, Ms. Kwong was the Policy Analyst for Children’s Home Society of California where she worked on education and early childhood issues.  She was recognized for her work by the Child Development Policy Institute.

Ms. Kwong is a graduate of the George Washington University Law School and has a BA in International Affairs.

James McElligott, MD, MSCR, serves as the Executive Medical Director for Telehealth at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and as an Associate Professor in the Division of General Pediatrics at MUSC Children’s Hospital. He oversees the MUSC Center for Telehealth, which has the responsibility of managing more than $100 million in South Carolina state-appropriated funds for the application of telehealth. Dr. McElligott currently serves as the Chair of the Advisory Council of the South Carolina Telehealth Alliance.

Dr. McElligott’s career has been driven by a passion for telehealth and for helping the vulnerable and his conviction that the way to do so is through population-level change. Given the magnitude of the healthcare disparities in his region, Dr. McElligott has come to believe that real progress can currently only be made through the radical innovation offered by telehealth. Dr. McElligott was educated at the University of North Carolina, Wake Forest School of Medicine and the Medical University of South Carolina.

Frank Micciche is NCQA’s Vice President of Public Policy and External Relations. He directs NCQA’s relationships with Congress, federal agencies, and the states, and he directs the committee’s work with employers, associations, corporate sponsors, and the media.

Micciche was formerly the Vice President for Partnerships and Coalitions at the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a nonpartisan collaboration of prominent public and private sector leaders and more than 350,000 grassroots supporters working to address the nation’s fiscal imbalance. Prior to this, he was a Senior Advisor on health reform at McKenna, Long & Aldridge, LLP, and he worked for the New America Foundation think tank.

Micciche’s service in the public sector includes time spent as a legislative director for the House Minority Leader in Massachusetts and as a federal liaison for Governor John Engler of Michigan. He served for four years as the Director of State-Federal Relations for Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), where he led the Commonwealth’s Washington, D.C. office and advised the governor on federal policy issues, with a focus on healthcare reform.

Micciche holds a master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Tufts University.

Feyi Ayodele, MBA, is the co-founder and CEO of CancerIQ, a fast-growing precision health platform that allows providers to identify, evaluate, and manage entire patient populations based on individual genetic risk factors. Ayodele co-founded CancerIQ in 2013 after she took a sabbatical from the finance world to work alongside her mother—renowned medical oncologist Dr. Olufunmilayo Olopade—in the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics at the University of Chicago. 

Embracing the shift to connected care, CancerIQ fully integrates with genetics laboratories, EHRs, and specialty software vendors to streamline workflow, guide clinician decision-making, and improve patient outcomes and savings. The company’s mission is to ensure more people have access to the right genetic testing services and the right preventive care so cancer can be caught earlier or the risk can be eliminated altogether. CancerIQ’s precision health platform has been adopted by more than 65 health systems and hundreds of providers across the United States, helping inform care for hundreds of thousands of patients.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ayodele led CancerIQ’s telehealth efforts to enable providers to continue to identify high-risk patients with potential cancer diagnoses, replacing lost in-person visit volume, and triaging care to avoid a second wave of COVID-19 related deaths. 

In recognition of her career successes, Ayodele was named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40 list in 2019, and she has won multiple honors, including the Chicago Booth New Venture Challenge, a fellowship from Rock Health, and 1776’s Global Challenge Cup.

Chevon Rariy, MD, is an endocrinologist who is double board-certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism. She is the National Program Director of Telehealth at Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) and the Medical Director of Endocrinology. Dr. Rariy has more than 15 years of experience in telehealth. She has spearheaded the launch of a rural health tele-oncology program that promotes a coordinated care approach between a national cancer center and rural hospitals. Most recently, Dr. Rariy led the rapid scale-up and implementation of a national telehealth program within an oncology health system network that led to an 80-fold increase in utilization, totaling approximately 8,000 telehealth visits in four weeks.

Dr. Rariy earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and did a fellowship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. She has delivered more than 20 presentations at national conferences, including a presentation on oncology and telehealth at the FDA Center for Excellence in Oncology. Dr. Rariy has published in peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Becker’s Hospital Review.

Dr. Rariy has won numerous awards for her work in clinical research. Most recently, she received the CTCA Chairman’s Award for her contributions in telehealth. Dr. Rariy sits on a number of advisory boards, including Doximity, an online physician networking firm whose membership includes more than 70 percent of U.S. physicians.

Junaid Razzak, MBBS, MD, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He recently served as the founding chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine and founding director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. Dr. Razzak is also the founding member and CEO of Aman Healthcare Services—a nonprofit organization in Karachi. Dr. Razzak played a pivotal role in the establishment of emergency medicine as a specialty in Pakistan, starting the first advanced life support service in Karachi and helping launch the largest health call center in Pakistan.

Dr. Razzak’s current research focuses on implementing and measuring health system innovations for enhancing access to emergency healthcare for vulnerable populations, especially in low- and middle-income countries. As director of telemedicine in the Emergency Medicine Department at Hopkins, Dr. Razzak is leading an innovative clinical and research program on the use of technology in improving access to emergency care.

Stormee Williams, MD, FAAP, has practiced medicine in the Dallas area for more than a decade, both as a board-certified pediatrician and a healthcare innovator. She began her career in federally qualified and community health clinics treating underserved populations. During her time at Children’s Health System of Texas, Dr. Williams has transformed the way children in Texas receive medical care through technology. She helped develop the fastest-growing school-based telemedicine program in the country, expanding to nearly 200 schools in 27 school districts in northern Texas.

In her role as the Medical Director and Vice President of Network Development and Innovation at Children’s Health, Dr. Williams provides clinical oversight of the many virtual health programs in the health system. She serves as the clinical leader of the Children’s Health Care Network, helping foster alignment between Children’s Health and other community providers. Dr. Williams also oversees the Health Equity Department at Children’s Health and strives to diminish the many barriers, biases, and disparities in healthcare. Described as a servant leader, Dr. Williams enjoys serving the community both within the hospital and outside it. She hopes to continue her work to expand healthcare access to those who need it most.