LTC Data Cooperative

​Title: Chief Medical Officer, AHCA

David Gifford, MD, MPH, serves as the Chief Medical Officer as well as the Director of the Center for Health Policy Evaluation in Long Term Care at the American Health Care Association​. He established the Center and the Quality Department at AHCA. His interests are in improving and measuring quality in LTC as well as how regulatory and payment policies impact quality. He has developed 8 new quality measures for nursing homes that all received NQF e​ndorsement. 

He oversees a team of data analysis working with national MDS data, Medicare Claims, and Cost Reports to develop quality measures and conduct policy evaluations. Dr. Gifford also serves on the Board of the Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes campaign and the Baldrige Foundation Board and chairs the Department of Veterans Affairs Geriatric and Gerontology Advisory Committee. He serves on the NQF Measures Applications Partnership (MAP). 

He is a former Director of the Rhode Island State Department of Health, where he received the National Governor’s award for Distinguished Service Award for State Officials. He led efforts to expand public reporting of quality for home health and nursing homes and to make the nursing home survey process more person centered. Prior to that he served as Chief Medical Officer for Quality Partners of Rhode Island where he directed CMS’ national nursing home-based quality improvement effort. He also is on the Brown University faculty in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health as well as being a member of Brown’s Center for Quality and Innovation in LTC. He received his medical degree from Case Western Reserve University and conducted his geriatric fellowship at UCLA where he also earned his Master’s in Public Health while a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. ​
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​Title: Executive Director, Long-Term Care Data Cooperative, AHCA

Stephanie M. Kissam is a health services researcher with over 20 years of leadership in public health program development, research, and management. She started at AHCA in October 2023 after nearly 15 years at RTI International, where she led large national evaluation projects for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation and the Administration for Community Living.  Her areas of research include state health policy, health IT implementation, nursing home quality measure development and maintenance, and outcomes of value-based payment models. Earlier in her career she supported leadership at the Rhode Island Department of Health and later at the Office of Health and Human Services in strategic development. In that role, she contributed to the development of the state’s Health Information Exchange and patient-centered medical home initiatives. Additionally, at the Rhode Island Quality Improvement Organization, she developed resources to support nursing homes with CMS’s National Nursing Home Quality Initiative. She received her Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan.

​Title: Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy & Practice at Brown University School of Public Health

Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. Her research agenda broadly focuses on understanding how frail medically-complex older adults receive healthcare services, and how factors affecting the nursing and primary care workforces impact quality outcomes in long-term care. During the COVID-19 pandemic she assisted in the construction of large data systems of nursing home electronic health records to examine various aspects of COVID-19 management, treatment, and outcomes among nursing home residents and staff. Dr. White completed an AHRQ T32 postdoctoral fellowship at Brown in the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research, and an NINR T32 predoctoral fellowship in the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. In addition to her research, Dr. White is a board-certified adult geriatric primary care nurse practitioner and currently practices at the PACE Organization of Rhode Island.

Amy Recker, MPH, is a project director in the Center for Long-Term Care Quality & Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health. She directs project management for a portfolio of research projects focused in long-term care, including the Long-Term Care Data Cooperative. Her background as an epidemiologist for both the Illinois and Massachusetts Departments of Public Health has been focused on long-term care, emerging healthcare-associated infections, and multi-drug resistant organisms. During her time in Illinois, she worked on managing the emerging Candida auris epidemic spreading through skilled nursing facilities. In Massachusetts, she served as an epidemiologist on the long-term care team during the COVID-19 pandemic. She received her Master’s in Public Health, with a joint concentration in epidemiology and biostatistics, from the University of Southern California.​
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Title: Senior Research Director, Acumen, LLC

Susan Siford has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager supervising the day-to-day operations of complex programs serving large populations of end users. Before coming to Acumen, she managed multiple departments within a three-hospital system, which included the adoption of several large-scale IT projects across the hospital system (e.g., Computerized Physician Order Entry). These IT implementations required extensive data evaluation, process restructuring, systems configuration, testing, validation, and comprehensive stakeholder management. Currently, Dr. Siford serves as project director for the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Data LINKAGE Program where she oversees the linkage of NIA-funded studies to CMS data followed by distribution of CMS data to researchers within Acumen’s secure enclave system. She also oversees the Modeling and Analytical Support Services contract with Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), Health Policy Office, where she coordinates the development of research files and linked-data sets for use by government researchers and rapid- turnaround analyses. She also assists in the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) Data Management and Analysis contract with the provision of a secure computing environment for MedPAC analysts to access the universe of Medicare data for use in the evaluation and analysis of the Medicare payment system. In this role, she oversees aspects of data intake from multiple sources into secure data environments, production of linked research files for use by government researchers, and simultaneous internal analyses to inform discussions surrounding the potential impacts of policy reforms. Dr. Siford is a certified Project Management Professional.

Title: Director of Data Governance, Acumen, LLC

Sean MaCurdy has successfully managed the production and distribution of CMS-linked research files for the NAI Data LINKAGE Program for over a decade. Mr. MaCurdy has thorough knowledge of healthcare data and analytic systems, with considerable experience in securing, organizing, manipulating, analyzing, validating, and linking large datasets. He has extensive experience with data security regulations and requirements, including FISMA, Privacy Act, and HIPAA, and serves as the central point of access for Acumen-held CMS data and related research files. He leads Acumen’s data acquisition efforts with CMS and other data sources, and the coordination of establishing and executing the necessary DUAs. Mr. MaCurdy works directly with the CMS Office of Technology Solutions to perform real-time data validation checks against CMS’s IDR and rapid-turnaround data validation investigations. He has participated in technical expert panels assessing analytic capabilities for various longitudinal data structures, validation investigations, and data access and acquisition processes for sources such as T- MSIS. Mr. MaCurdy has extensive experience in assisting NIA-supported researchers in understanding how to use restricted data and in performing their programming tasks.