Joanthan Bakdash, PhD

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Dr. Bakdash is a Social Scient Analyst for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). He has over two decades of experience conducting basic and applied cross-disciplinary behavioral research. His current research areas include healthcare, decision-making, applied statistics, human-machine interaction, and visual perception.

Rebecca Anhang Price, PhD

RAND

Rebecca Anhang Price, PhD is a Senior Policy Researcher at RAND. Her research focuses on evaluating and promoting quality of care for individuals with serious illnesses. She currently serves as principal investigator of a CMS project to nationally implement the CAHPS Hospice Survey and leads the evaluation of the hospice benefit component of the Value-Based Insurance Design. Previously, she served as principal investigator of contracts to develop the CAHPS Hospice Survey, and to support CMS’s implementation of the CAHPS for ACOs and CAHPS for PQRS and MIPS Surveys.

Melissa Bradley

RAND

Melissa A. Bradley is the Associate Director of the RAND Survey Research Group (SRG) with over 35 years’ experience in research design, instrument development, project management, and qualitative and quantitative data collection. She is currently Co-Principal Investigator for the National Implementation of the CAHPS Hospice Survey. Ms. Bradley specializes in large and complex projects such as those involving establishments, physicians, seriously ill adults, and individuals who are hard-to-reach. She has overseen instrument design for many projects and led an array of data collection efforts including, focus groups, cognitive interviews, data abstraction, testing, field tracking, and mail, web surveys, and telephone surveys.

Susan Wang, MD

Kaiser Permanente

Susan Wang is the National Medical Director for Palliative Care at Kaiser Permanente (KP) where she supports the implementation of a high-quality ecosystem for the care of people with serious illness. Dr. Wang is also Regional Chief of the Dept. of Geriatrics & Palliative Medicine in KP Southern California, with oversight for outpatient, inpatient, SNF, and home services across 16 hospitals. She is the hospice Medical Director for KP SCAL/HI. She has led the region as medical director of Life Care Planning and Shared Decision Making for over a decade, creating decision support tools and training thousands of physicians and other clinicians in primary palliative skills. Dr. Wang is director emeritus of the KP Los Angeles Hospice & Palliative Medicine fellowship, a program that she created in 2008. She is a clinical professor at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and triple board-certified in Internal, Geriatric, and Palliative Medicine.

Stephanie Fry, CPXP, Associate Vice President

Westat

Stephanie Fry is a Westat Senior Study Director with more than 20 years of experience with patient experience surveys and data collection methodologies. She has worked as part of the CAHPS instrumentation team for nearly 15 years. Her recent research topics have included measurement of patient experience, delivery of health care services, cultural competence, and public reporting to drive informed consumer choice. Ms. Fry has a wide set of skills including survey development, cognitive testing, methodological review, data collection design, and plain language reporting.