Shea Polancich, PhD, RN, FAAN has been practicing in quality and patient safety for over 20 years. She is currently an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Nursing with a primary practice at the UAB Medical Center, Birmingham, Alabama as a director specializing in nursing improvement, innovation, and analytics. Formerly, her roles included the Director for Quality and Patient Safety at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Director of Data Analysis and Measurement at Texas Health Resources, NIH/NINR research intern, and health policy fellow at George Mason University. She served on an NQF advisory group specific to patient safety and adverse events. She may be contacted at​ [email protected].

Robin Mark is a Partner in the firm’s Commercial Litigation practice group. Robin is an experienced trial attorney with extensive litigation experience in civil and criminal matters. She focuses her practice on complex commercial litigation and the representation of individuals and corporations in government and internal investigations. Robin represents individuals and businesses who are involved in state or federal government investigations as witnesses, victims, or potential targets. She assists clients with navigating their potential civil and criminal exposure and responding to law enforcement inquiries.

Robin served for ten years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. As an AUSA, she served as the lead prosecutor in hundreds of investigations and prosecutions, including cases involving bank fraud, embezzlement, identity fraud, money laundering, civil rights, healthcare fraud, cyber crimes, environmental crimes, tax fraud, public corruption, and national security cases. Robin worked as the Elder Justice Coordinator and served for many years as a member of the Financial Crimes Task Force. She most recently served as the Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division overseeing the prosecution of white collar matters in the Northern District of Alabama. Robin offers clients a unique perspective in navigating government investigations and enforcement proceedings.

Before she was an AUSA, Robin assisted clients with commercial and financial litigation matters and also represented individuals facing criminal charges in state and federal court.

Robin also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Cumberland School of Law where she teaches Basic Skills of Trial Advocacy and Jury Selection. Robin is an active member of the Birmingham Bar Association, where she has previously served on the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors for the Women’s Section, the Board of Directors for the Volunteer Lawyers Program, as the Young Lawyers Section President and Vice President-Social, and as a member of the Grievance Committee.

During law school Robin was selected as the only law clerk at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Alabama to serve as a member of the team that prosecuted the defendants charged and convicted in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama.

Dr. Rick van Pelt is the Chief Clinical Transformation Officer (CCTO) and leader of the Clinical Practice Transformation Department (CPT) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Medicine. Dr. van Pelt is a board certified anesthesiologist with more than 30 years of experience in clinical practice, performance and quality improvement, patient safety, and change management within health systems. His areas of thought leadership and expertise include: System-based performance improvement; Frontline-driven interprofessional practice redesign and implementation of high reliability clinical operating systems; Clinical variation management; Peer support and mitigation of systems-induced stress and burnout; and Implementation Science.

Dr. van Pelt led the development of the 3D Problem Solving methodology (3DPS), a novel leadership paradigm that integrates systems theory, participatory management theory and peer support theory into a synergistic approach for complex problem solving. Frontline interprofessional teams guided, supported and empowered to tap their “collective genius” in identifying critical areas of systems improvement impacting their ability to deliver exceptional care, and to develop and implement sustained solutions. 3D Problem Solving intentionally addresses the team’s emotional stress and burnout related to systems dysfunction and leverages this to target critical improvement areas. In engaging teams with this approach, their identified sources of systems stress become highly relevant points of improvement activity, which create a strong driver of collective ownership and accountability. In addition to creating high impact and sustained solutions, team improvement activity becomes an active wellness intervention that mitigates the root system causes of their stress and burnout. The result is a naturally scalable win-win for organizational systems transformation and wellness.

Dr. van Pelt has also been a pioneer in peer support since his involvement in a catastrophic medical event in 1999, which exposed a profound gap in emotionally supporting patients, families and caregivers following these events. For caregivers, peer support has been recognized internationally as an accessible and effective intervention in restoring wellness. In addition to founding one of the first Peer Support programs at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2005, Dr. van Pelt continues to serve as an active member on the Massachusetts General Hospital’s PeerCare training team, and is actively leading the implementation of the PeerConnect program at UAB Medicine.

Patricia A. Patrician, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a Professor and Rachel Z. Booth Endowed Chair in Nursing at the School of Nursing, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in Birmingham, Alabama. She joined the UAB faculty in 2008 after serving 26 years in the US Army Nurse Corps, where she rose in positions from critical care staff nurse to nurse manager to cardiothoracic clinical nurse specialist. She taught in the military’s LPN program and administered the Army’s Continuing Nursing Education program. After earning her PhD, she served as the Chief of Nursing Research at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Her final military position as Chief, Department of Nursing Science at the Academy of Health Sciences, positioned her well for academia. At UAB she teaches and mentors students in the PhD and the Executive DNP Programs. She conducts research on the nursing workforce and nursing’s contributions to patient safety and quality outcomes. Dr. Patrician Co-Directs of the VA Quality Scholars (VAQS) fellowship program at the Birmingham VA site and mentors post-doctoral nurses, physicians, and pharmacists in quality improvement and improvement science activities. She has authored or co-authored over 110 peer-reviewed publications and several book chapters.

Her research focuses on the contribution of nursing to quality and safety of patient care, particularly in hospitals. She is currently working on several projects evaluating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the nursing workforce and on patient care, as well as interventions to assist in the recovery of nurses post-pandemic.

Dr. Patrician earned a BSN from Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; MSN in Critical Care from the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, Texas; a Masters in Strategic Studies from the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA; and PhD in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

Michael Crouch serves as the Fred E. McWhorter Dean and Professor of Samford University’s McWhorter School of Pharmacy. His education includes a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the University of North Carolina, followed by a first-year pharmacy residency at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Crouch also received a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the Medical University of South Carolina, where he completed a second-year residency focused on cardiology.

Additional education has included a Master of Business Administration from Samford University’s Brock School of Business. Specific leadership development has involved the Harvard Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, leadership programs of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and collaboratives of Johnson City and Birmingham.

Crouch joined Samford University as Dean and Professor in 2014. Previous faculty appointments included Virginia Commonwealth University (Assistant then Associate Professor of Pharmacy and Medicine), South University (Chair and Professor), and East Tennessee State University (Associate Dean, then Executive Associate Dean and Director of the Interprofessional Education Program). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Crouch served as Acting Associate Provost of Samford University’s College of Health Sciences.

Crouch is a leader in pharmacy higher education, practice and scholarship. He has dedicated his career to educating professional students, graduate students and pharmacy residents, for which he has received various teaching awards. Crouch is a third-generation pharmacist with diverse practice experience in ambulatory care, hospital and critical care pharmacy. In addition to being a licensed pharmacist, he obtained board certification in pharmacotherapy in 1996, with added qualifications in cardiology in 2000. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists named him a fellow in 2009.

In addition to over 100 scholarly publications and 200 invited presentations, Crouch has served as editor for two books: Cardiovascular Pharmacotherapy: A Point-of-Care Guide and Securing and Excelling in a Pharmacy Residency.

He presently serves as a site visitor for the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education and on the Paraguay Baptist Medical Center Foundation, Tuscaloosa Research and Education Advancement Corporation Board, Albert Schweitzer of Alabama Advisory Council and Alabama Statewide AHEC Advisory Council.

Crouch is married to his wife, Candace, and together they have three teenage children, Jack, Julia and Anna. In addition to spending time with his family, he enjoys fly fishing, golfing, motorcycling and music.

Terry is the Chief Development Officer at VIVA Health, Inc. VIVA Health is a managed care organization owned by the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System (UAB Health System). Terry has been with VIVA Health for over 26 years.  Terry graduated from the University of Alabama in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Commerce and Business Administration majoring in Health Care Management. He later obtained both a Master of Science and Doctorate of Science in Health Administration from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Terry worked for MedPartners and then Columbia/HCA prior to joining the VIVA Health team in April 1997.  Beginning as a Network Development Representative, he became Director of Network Development in August 1999. In January 2003, he assumed the Vice President of Provider Services role adding oversight of all provider network operations including quality incentive programs for network providers. Named as VIVA Health’s first Chief Development Officer in April 2020, Terry’s role expanded to include commercial sales and business development. 

Nancy Borkowski, DBA, CPA, FACHE, FHFMA is a professor in the Department of Health Services Administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the UAB Site Co–Director, NSF I/UCRC Center for Health Organization Transformation.

Dr. Wallace is a native of Alabama. He received his BS in Spanish from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He graduated AOA from medical school at UAB. He completed his residency training at UAB as well after which he served as Chief Medical Resident. He then pursued a nephrology fellowship at Vanderbilt University and served as Chief Nephrology fellow. After his fellowship, Dr. Wallace joined the faculty at UAB. Currently, he is the UAB Medical Director of Telehealth, Director of the UAB Home Dialysis Program, and co-director of the UAB Fabry Disease Clinic. Since becoming faculty, his research has been focused on eliminating geographic and socioeconomic barriers which prevents patients from accessing specialized care. Primarily, he has focused on telemedicine in the provision of care in home dialysis and rare diseases such as Fabry disease, a rare genetic disease. Using the platform of telemedicine established for his studies on home dialysis, he is focused on creating a network and establishing processes by which physicians at the University of Alabama at Birmingham could provide medical expertise across the state of Alabama using telemedicine thus increasing access to care to patients who due to geographic and/or financial constraints may not be able to travel to UAB. It is his hope that with these studies, the physician workforce distribution issues can be addressed and access to care across the country can be improved.

Rubin Pillay, Ph.D., is a medical futurist and professor of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship in the Collat School of Business and the assistant dean for global health innovation in the Heersink School of Medicine. He is a family physician and clinical pharmacologist who holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration, MBA, and M.S. in Health Management. He has extensive international teaching and consulting experience and has published widely in the field of strategic health leadership. His current work focuses on the role of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in the transformation of health and healthcare. He is the editor in chief of the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Health.