With over 30 years experience as attorney and association manager specializing in employee benefits, self-insurance and captive insurance for corporations and associations George Pantos is the Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute.

 
Previously serving as Chief Counsel for the Self Insurance Institute of America (SIIA) and a former partner in the national law firm Vedder Price of Chicago, Pantos co-founded and served as counsel to The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC), a national coalition of 125 major employers concerned with ERISA benefits issues. For more than 13 years, he served as principal counsel to ERIC, drafting briefs in five major U.S. Supreme Court cases involving ERISA preemption.

Prior to entering private law practice, Pantos served in the U.S. government as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce in the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he managed the legislative-relations program for a Cabinet-level federal agency. Earlier in his career, Pantos worked as an attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business association, where he concentrated on employer-policy issues before Congress.

As president of privately-held WellNet Healthcare, a healthcare management company, Lemer and his firm enable businesses and their executive management team to measure, manage and reduce  healthcare costs by using real-time healthcare information to make better business decisions. He has lobbied extensively on Capitol Hill for health reform and has been featured in Business Week, Drug Benefit News, Managed Healthcare Executive, Portfolio.com, The Washington Post, The Washington Business Journal and C-SPAN. Lemer is also a founding partner of Healthcare Interactive, a software development firm that develops healthcare applications. Philanthropically, Lemer serves on the board of Sheridan School, a K-8 independent school located in Washington, DC.  He is also  on the board of Face in the Mirror, a national non-profit that promotes cancer patients' well-being by helping patients apply facial cosmetics to encourage and promote the psychological and outer well-being of cancer patients. Their credo: “When we look better, we feel better; when we feel better, the healing process begins.”         

Henry Cha is a healthcare technologist who specializes in delivering software as a service (SaaS) offerings that help companies better manage employee healthcare programs and related costs.   His SaaS technologies provide a simplified and consolidated environment for employee members.  He is also an expert in using computational and statistical techniques to present and analyze health data.  Cha has employed predictive modeling and latent class modeling to identify risk parameters. When these insights on risk are combined with web technologies, employers can avoid increases in health plan costs and more effectively engage with members to encourage healthy lifestyles and stick with proven medical treatments. As a leader in the development of Healthcare Performance Management (HPM) software, Healthcare Interactive uses HealthSpace, a platform technology developed by Cha that allows plan sponsors, members and providers to manage healthcare risks and costs in a collaborative environment.

William “Bill” Lavis IV has led the Employee Benefits practice at SML since 1988. He started his employee benefit career with Canada Life in 1986, joined SML two years later and became a Partner in 1993. Lavis has helped grow SML into one of the largest and most respected insurance brokerage and benefits consulting firms in Northern California. In addition to being a member of every major insurance carrier’s Broker Advisory Board, Lavis is also active in industry groups including the Golden Gate Health Underwriters Association, the Californian Association of Health Underwriters and the National Association of Health Underwriters. He is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts in designing consumer driven health plans, creating alternative funding options and building cutting edge care management & cost control programs.

Todd C. Thompson is Chief Operating Officer for Healthcare Interactive Federal, a leader in providing governmental agencies with healthcare technology solutions. Thompson  most recently served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Financial Services & Human Capital line of business within Lockheed Martin Corporation. Thompson worked for Lockheed Martin for 23 years of his 30 year career in information technology. He is a recognized expert in utilizing information technology to solve business problems for large enterprises (both commercial and federal). During his time with Lockheed Martin, Thompson has held several senior leadership positions in the areas of, program management, systems engineering, IT management, strategy and planning. In these roles, Thompson and his teams have led some of the largest IT projects in industry including F-22, Titan Launch Vehicle and the Joint Strike Fighter (F-35). Thompson attended the University of Wyoming, Montana State University and Stanford University and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive program. Thompson has certifications in business/leadership, program management, organizational development, negotiations, information technology, systems engineering, enterprise architecture and strategic planning.

Paul Chang leads business strategy and market development for emerging Information Management technologies in the IBM Software Group. In this role, he is responsible for the development and execution of IBM’s “Smarter Supplychain” solutions across multiple industries including pharmaceutical, consumer products, automotive, retail, and industrial.

Chang has more than 20 years of experience in technology and market development in RFID, biotech, and optical network technologies. Most recently, Chang has lead the global initiative at IBM in the pharmaceutical and distribution industries, working with many global pharmaceutical manufacturers and large wholesalers to implement a serialization/RFID strategy to drive business value in addition to comply with global regulatory mandates. He has also been actively involved with the US FDA's anti-counterfeiting initiative since 2003, and has recently engaged the FDA to educate them of the state of the art food traceability technologies. Paul earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Carnegie Mellon in mechanical engineering.
 

Scott Haas is Vice President of Integrated Healthcare Metrics at Wells Fargo Insurance Services. He has over 27 years of employee benefits experience and extensive background in the development and management of medical and disease management, prescription drug programs as well as provider network evaluation, valuation and underwriting. Haas started and operationalized a Third Party-Administrator (TPA) and a Prescription Benefit Management (PBM) platform from scratch.  Scott has worked in the arena of alternative funding for the majority of his career. Haas is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney with Bachelor of Science degrees in Business Administration and Economics.  He earned the Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and Registered Health Underwriter (RHU) designations in 1985 and 1986 respectively.  Haas has held officer level positions within commercial health insurers as well as Blues plans and a Third-Party-Administrator’s as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Vice President of Underwriting and President. Haas has also served as a Trustee of both defined benefit and 401(k) plans for both union and non-union employees.

Sabrina Orque serves the Charlie Palmer Group as the Vice President of Human Resources. In this role, she has spent the last eight years managing all aspects of Human Resources for 13 restaurants, one hotel and three retail shops totaling roughly 1,500 employees spanning five states.  Orque’s responsibilities include working with operational leadership on organizational development, training, performance management, leadership development, employment, compensation, payroll, benefits and employee and labor relations. Prior to Charlie Palmer Group, she spent three years as a Benefits and Compensation Manager for Aladdin Resort & Casino (now Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino) handling benefits administration for 3,500 people while overseeing compensation objectives. Orque has a B.A. in Hotel Administration with emphasis in Human Resources from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Marcos Lopez is President and CEO of eXude Benefits Group. He has spent the last 20 years providing clients with the highest level of research available to the small-to-mid-size market. Marcos has a track record of lowering healthcare, life and other ancillary benefit costs for his clients. With a concentration of non‐profit clients, he has successfully designed and negotiated programs that allow organizations to continue to maintain a high level of benefit, on a fixed budget. Marcos co‐founded Group Benefits On‐line, Inc., now eXude Benefits Group. He also founded the Retirement Plans Division (2002), Human Resources Division (2006) and Discount Prescription Card (2010) as a way of providing a wider breadth of services to current and prospective clients.