Staff

George Miller has served on the technical staff of Altarum and one of Altarum’s predecessor organizations, Vector Research, Inc., since 1972. He is currently affiliated with Altarum’s Center for Value in Health Care, where he participates in the center’s efforts to track national health spending, understand the drivers of spending growth, and quantify a sustainable spending growth rate.

In other efforts, he has supported Altarum in applications of operations research to modeling and analysis of health care issues that have included topics in the value of prevention, disease management, medical responses to demand surges, cost-effectiveness of clinical interventions, beneficiary population forecasting, telemedicine, graduate medical education, medical logistics, medical staffing, medical facilities planning, and collections forecasting.

His work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine; the Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Health Affairs; Medical Decision Making; Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research; Health Care Management Science; Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology; the International Journal of Disaster Medicine; the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety; Interfaces; Management Science; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics; and IIE Transactions. He frequently serves as a reviewer for several of these journals.

Dr. Miller is a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has chaired numerous sessions at national INFORMS meetings , served on INFORMS’s Long-Range Planning Committee, and served for 7 years (3 years as Chair) of its committee to select the recipient of the Bonder Scholarship for Applied Operations Research in Health Services.

Dr. Miller received his BSE, MSE, and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, where he subsequently served as an adjunct assistant professor.

Mark Fendrick, a founding Partner of VBID Health, is Director of the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design (www.vbidcenter.org), which he co-founded. Dr. Fendrick remains clinically active in the practice of general internal medicine, seeing patients weekly. He is also a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Health Management and Policy at The University of Michigan.

Dr. Fendrick is one of three U-M faculty that first developed and named the concept "Value-Based Insurance Design (V-BID)." Through his leadership at the U-M Center for Value-Based Insurance Design, he has been acknowledged by Managed Care as a "leading authority" on the topic, which became part of the health care law in 2010. He is a leading advocate for development, implementation, and evaluation of innovative health benefit plans.

Dr. Fendrick has authored over 200 articles and book chapters and lectures frequently on the quality and cost implications of medical care to diverse audiences around the world. He is the Co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Managed Care and is an editorial board member for three additional peer-reviewed publications. His perspective and understanding of clinical and economic issues have fostered collaborations with numerous government agencies, health plans, professional societies, and health care companies. He serves on the Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee. In 2009, he was named one of the "20 people who make healthcare better" by HealthLeaders Media for the creation and implementation of value-based insurance design.

Beth Beaudin-Seiler, is a Health Care Research Analyst, with the Systems Research and Initiatives Group at Altarum. Since coming to Altarum, Dr. Beaudin-Seiler has worked on multiple projects concerning the defining and measurement of low value care, while providing support to multiple Centers within Altarum.

Prior to her position at Altarum, Dr. Beaudin-Seiler was a research associate for the College of Aviation at Western Michigan University, where she focused on human factors research and crossover work between high risk industries such as health care and aviation.

Dr. Beaudin-Seiler holds a Ph.D. in public affairs and administration from Western Michigan University.

Michael Chernew, Ph.D., a founding Partner of VBID Health, is a Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He was one of the original creators of the VBID Concept and he co-directed the University of Michigan Center for Value-Based Insurance Design (www.vbidcenter.org) with Dr. Fendrick before joining Harvard.

Dr. Chernew's research examines several areas related to controlling health care spending growth while maintaining or improving the quality of care. His work on consumer incentives focuses on Value Based Insurance Design, which aligns patient cost sharing with clinical value. Several large companies have adopted these approaches and Dr. Chernew's ongoing work includes evaluations and design of such programs. His work on payment reform involves evaluation of bundled payment initiatives, including global payment models that include pay-for-performance components. Related research examines the effects of changes in Medicare Advantage payment rates. Additional research explores the causes and consequences of rising health care spending and geographic variation in spending, spending growth, and quality.

Dr. Chernew is a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Health Advisors and of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT). He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2011, he served on the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Determination of Essential Health Benefits and, in 2010, was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Chernew is the former Vice Chair of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which is an independent agency established to advise the U.S. Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program. In 2000, 2004, and 2010, he served on technical advisory panels for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that reviewed the assumptions used by Medicare actuaries to assess the financial status of Medicare trust funds. On these panels, Dr. Chernew focused on the methodology used to project trends in long-term health care spending growth. In April 2015, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker appointed Dr. Chernew to the Massachusetts Health Connector Board of Directors.

Chris Duke is co-director of Altarum's Consumer Engagement Programs, which seeks to understand and promote how consumers’ individual preferences for care can inform their health care decisions. Dr. Duke is also a Senior Analyst with Altarum’s Survey and Patient Engagement Research Group. With a background in social psychology, statistics, and research methodology, Dr. Duke’s research specialty is in understanding how consumers seek and use health care information, patient engagement, and patient satisfaction. 

In collaboration with Wendy Lynch, Brad Smith, and Safeway Health, he helped develop the Altarum Consumer Engagement (ACE) Measure. The ACE Measure assesses how engaged patients are with their own health care and successfully predicts many health care-related outcomes, including current health status, health-related lifestyle behaviors, medication adherence, use of preventative care, and willingness to pay for care.

Dr. Duke is a researcher for several health care survey research programs, including for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and others. Research topics include how consumers seek and use health care information, patient engagement, patient satisfaction, HIV treatment practices, diagnostic laboratory medicine practices, and several other health care topics.

Dr. Duke earned his Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Exeter and his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Berry College. Before coming to Altarum, he taught psychology and statistics at the University of Exeter as a graduate fellow.