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This podcast is presented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC – safer, healthier people.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. Today is the last Health Systems Transformation Seminar for this semester, and we're going out with a bang. Our speaker is Ken Thorpe, who is Robert Woodruff Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management here at Rollins. He's also the Executive Director of Emory's Institute for Advanced Policy Solutions—the think tank that does more than think, it actually puts solutions into practice.

He's also the Executive Director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, a national coalition of patients, providers, community organizations, business and labor groups, and health policy experts, all committed to raising awareness of the policies and practices that save lives and reduce health costs through more effective prevention and management of chronic disease. Ken has authored or coauthored more than 80 articles and book chapters on health policy and has focused for many years on the toll obesity and its sequelae take on America's health.

We also have two superb discussants today, Dr. Ron Goetzel and Dr. Janet Collins. Ron is the Founding Director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies—ahem, excuse me—as well as Vice President, Consulting and Applied Research, at MedStaff. And the mission of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies is to bridge the gap between academia, the business community, and the health care policy world, bringing together academic resources into the policy debate in day-to-day business decisions that corporate America makes to improve health and productivity across the board. And our second discussant is Dr. Janet Collins, who directs the National Center for Health—Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at CDC. Under Janet's leadership, the Center conducts studies to better understand the causes of chronic disease, support programs to promote healthy behaviors, and monitors the health of America through surveys and surveillance.

Critical to the success of these efforts are partnerships with state health and local health and education agencies, voluntary associations, private organizations, other federal agencies, and academia, including Emory, I'm proud to say. And over her career, much of Janet's work has focused on the surveillance of adolescent health risk behaviors and the development and evaluation of school-based programs to prevent tobacco use, poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and sexual risk behaviors. We're lucky to have the benefit of her expertise in confronting the major killers in America and the major drivers of health care costs.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Ken Thorpe and just briefly say that, in addition to being here at Emory, Ken has taught at Tulane, at the University of North Carolina, at the Harvard University School of Public Health, and at Columbia University. For those of you who don't know, he comes to us with experience in government as well. He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Policy at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, and in that role, he coordinated all the financial estimates and program impacts for President Clinton's health care proposals during the first health care reform effort.

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