The Center for Health Policy Evaluation in Long-Term Care

​David Gifford, MD, MPH, serves as Director of the Center for Health Policy Evaluation in Long Term Care at the American Health Care Association, where he also serves as the Sr VP for Quality and Regulatory Affairs since 2011. He established the Center and the Quality Department at AHCA. His interests are in improving and measuring quality in LTC as well as how regulatory and payment policies impact quality. He has developed 8 new quality measures for nursing homes that all received NQF endorsement. 

He oversees a team of data analysis working with national MDS data, Medicare Claims, and Cost Reports to develop quality measures and conduct policy evaluations. Dr. Gifford also serves on the Board of the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign and the Baldrige Foundation Board and chairs the Department of Veterans Affairs Geriatric and Gerontology Advisory Committee. He serves on the NQF Measures Applications Partnership (MAP). 

He is a former Director of the Rhode Island State Department of Health, where he received the National Governor’s award for Distinguished Service Award for State Officials. He led efforts to expand public reporting of quality for home health and nursing homes and to make the nursing home survey process more person centered. Prior to that he served as Chief Medical Officer for Quality Partners of Rhode Island where he directed CMS’ national nursing home-based quality improvement effort. He also is on the Brown University faculty in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health as well as being a member of Brown’s Center for Quality and Innovation in LTC. He received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and conducted his geriatric fellowship at UCLA where he also earned his Master’s in Public Health while a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar.

​Kiran Sreenivas is a Research Director at American Health Care Association (AHCA) in Washington, DC. He supports AHCA’s Quality Initiative, LTC Trend Tracker, and other projects aimed at improving lives and delivering solutions for quality care. His passion is helping others use data to make informed decisions.

Prior to joining AHCA, he worked four years at America’s Essential Hospitals on a collaborative to reduce hospital readmissions and hospital-acquired conditions, such as pressure ulcers and surgical site infections. Kiran is currently working on earning a Doctor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He received his master’s in health policy at George Washington University and his bachelor’s in biology at Northwestern University.

​Holly Harmon, RN, MBA, LNHA, FACHCA brings both passion and a wealth of practical, real-world, clinical and operational experience to her role as Associate Vice President, Quality & Clinical Affairs at AHCA. Her extensive service in a wide array of settings including post-acute care, long term care, residential care, assisted living, independent living, a psychiatric hospital and occupational health have provided her with insights, knowledge, skills and innovative ideas which she exuberantly shares with others.

 

In addition to her vast clinical experience, Ms. Harmon has put her dynamic energy into leading the statewide Maine Culture Change Coalition/LANE as President, the Maine Partnership to Improve Dementia Care in Nursing Homes as Co-Chair, Vice-President of American College of Health Care Administrators, Maine Chapter and the Maine LANE Co-Convener for the national Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes Campaign. She also served as the Director of Quality Improvement & Regulatory Affairs at the Maine Health Care Association.

 

She puts her boundless energy and warm and energetic personality into training, education and presenting both, nationally and locally. She has made simplifying the complex world of long term and post-acute care policy and practice an art.

​As Associate Vice President of Workforce and Quality Improvement for the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL), Dr. Schwartz develops and implements quality improvement initiatives, including quality measurement development and data collection and oversees workforce initiatives. She is a nationally recognized expert on quality in assisted living and workforce issues in long-term care. 

Dr. Schwartz was part of the development team for the CoreQ, a customer satisfaction measure for long term care settings. She led the process for National Quality Forum (NQF) endorsement for the assisted living CoreQ measures, the first AL-specific measures to be endorsed by NQF. Dr. Schwartz earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. During graduate school she worked as a research assistant for the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) and completed a Health Fellowship in the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee on Aging and Retirement. Prior to attending graduate school, Dr. Schwartz worked in home and community-based services in different roles including as direct care staff and as a case manager for an Area Agency on Aging. 

Sara Rudow, M.P.A., has worked for over ten years on policy analysis and implementation to support the delivery of high quality health care and social services to vulnerable populations. As AHCA’s Senior Director of Regulatory Services, Sara leads AHCA’s efforts to develop and promote systemic changes to regulations, policies, and practices to foster a more transparent and effective survey/regulatory process and to share information, develop resources, and provide advocacy on critical regulatory and quality issues facing nursing centers.

Prior to coming to AHCA, Sara led projects analyzing federal health care programs serving the elderly, disabled, and economically vulnerable and provided technical assistance to federal grantees. She also worked as an analyst at the US Government Accountability Office, assessing and providing recommendations to improve the implementation of federal health care programs. Rooted in her early experiences as a caseworker in a residential treatment center for young people with multiple disabilities, Sara is committed to bringing the voices of care providers into the policymaking process. Sara earned her B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University and her M.P.A. in Social and Health Policy from Cornell University.

​Marsida Domi is a senior research analyst at the American Health Care Association (AHCA) in Washington, D.C. Marsida is passionate about leveraging data and robust methods to address disparities in the quality of care patients receive. She leads AHCA’s measurement development and NQF endorsement efforts, achieving NQF endorsement for 7 measures including five customer satisfaction measures for nursing homes and assisted living facilities, as well as discharge to community and hospitalization measures. She led AHCA’s efforts on the NQF SES Trial Period, testing the impact of including socioeconomic factors in quality measures. She also oversees evaluations of the impact of Medicaid policies on quality as well as AHCA’s design and support to states implementing Medicaid Value-Based Purchasing programs. She has served on Batelle’s “Quality Measure Development: Supporting Efficiency and Innovation in the Process of Developing CMS Quality Measurement” Technical Expert Panel.

 

Prior to joining AHCA, she has worked with various organizations conducting clinical trials in leukemia and lymphoma, designing and implementing studies in breast and gynecologic cancers, and conducting economic evaluations in lung cancer clinical trials. 

 

Marsida received her Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in Comparative Effectiveness and Outcomes Research and her bachelor’s in Economics from Brown University.

​Terry Hawk is a Research Analyst at the American Health Care Association (AHCA) in Washington, DC. He supports AHCA’s Feedback Report production, Data Use Agreements, and other projects aimed at dataset building and analyses. His interests include utilizing data to objectively answer questions around the field of Long-Term Care.

Prior to his time at AHCA, Terry received his master’s in Nutritional Science with a focus on nutrition policy and project evaluation and a bachelor’s in biomedical studies.