Nancy-Ann DeParle, J.D., M.A., is a managing partner and co-founder of Consonance Capital Partners, a private equity firm focused on investing in innovative health care companies in the lower middle-market. She is a director of CVS Health, HCA Healthcare, Consonance portfolio companies Psychiatric Medical Care (PMC) and Sellers Dorsey, and a trustee of Duke University. She is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
From 2011-January 2013, she was Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy to President Barack Obama. A health policy expert, from 2009-2011 DeParle served as Counselor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Health Reform, where she spearheaded the Obama Administration’s successful effort to enact the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and managed the initial implementation of the law.
From 2006-2009, DeParle was a Managing Director of CCMP Capital Advisors, and a senior advisor to its predecessor, JPMorgan Partners, LLC. She has also been an Adjunct Professor and Senior Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee or director of a number of public or nonprofit boards including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. From 1997-2000, DeParle was Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Earlier in her career, she served as Associate Director for Health and Personnel at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as a litigation lawyer in private practice, and as Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Human Services.
A native of Rockwood, Tennessee, DeParle received a B.A. with highest honors from the University of Tennessee, where she was Student Body President, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She also received a B.A. and M.A. in Politics and Economics from Balliol College of Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., is the Robert J. Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine, and Policy, and founding Director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University. With offices in Durham, NC and Washington, DC, the Center is a university-wide Duke initiative that is quickly becoming nationally and internationally-recognized for research, evaluation, implementation, and educational initiatives to improve health policy and health. It integrates Duke’s expertise in the social, clinical, and analytical sciences alongside engagement with health care leaders and stakeholders, to develop and apply policy solutions that improve health, health equity, and the value of health care locally, nationally, and worldwide.
Dr. McClellan is a doctor and an economist whose has addressed a wide range of strategies and policy reforms to improve health care, including payment reform to promote better outcomes and lower costs, methods for development and use of real-world evidence, and strategies for more effective biomedical innovation.
At the center of the nation’s efforts to combat the pandemic, Dr. McClellan is the co-author of a roadmap that details the steps needed for a comprehensive COVID-19 response and safe reopening of our country. His current work on responding to the COVID-19 public health emergency spans virus containment and testing strategies, reforming health care toward more resilient models of delivering care, and accelerating the development of therapeutics and vaccines.
Before coming to Duke, he served as a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he was Director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiatives and led the Richard Merkin Initiative on Payment Reform and Clinical Leadership. He also has a highly distinguished record in public service and academic research.
Dr. McClellan is a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he developed and implemented major reforms in health policy. These include the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Medicare and Medicaid payment reforms, the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative, and public-private initiatives to develop better information on the quality and cost of care. He has also previously served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and senior director for health care policy at the White House, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury.
Dr. McClellan is the founding chair and a Senior Advisor of the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA and a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). He chairs the NAM’s Leadership Council for Value and Science-Driven Health Care, co-chairs the Guiding Committee of the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a Senior Advisor on the faculty of the University of Texas Dell Medical School and is an independent director on the boards of Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, Alignment Healthcare, and PrognomIQ. He was previously an associate professor of economics and medicine with tenure at Stanford University, and has twice received the Kenneth Arrow Award for Outstanding Research in Health Economics.
Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent at Kaiser Health News and host of KHN’s “What the Health?” podcast. She joined KHN after 16 years as health policy correspondent for NPR, where she helped lead the network’s coverage of the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A noted expert on health policy issues, Ms. Rovner is the author of the critically praised reference book Health Care Politics and Policy A-Z, now in its third edition. In 2005, she was awarded the National Press Foundation’s Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for distinguished reporting of Congress. Prior to NPR, Ms. Rovner covered health policy for National Journal’s Congress Daily and for Congressional Quarterly, among other organizations.
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