Military Health Summit

Commander Jean-Paul Chretien joined DARPA as a program manager in 2020. His interests include disease and injury prevention, operational medicine, and biothreat countermeasures.

Prior to coming to DARPA, Chretien led the Pandemic Warning Team at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence. A naval medical officer, his previous assignments include senior policy advisor for biodefense in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; team lead for Innovation & Evaluation at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch; and director of force health protection for U.S. and NATO forces in southwestern Afghanistan.

A proud mentor to nine graduate students and Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellows, he received the Rising Star Award from the American College of Preventive Medicine, Best Publication of the Year Award from the International Society for Disease Surveillance, and Skelton Award for Public Service from the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and 10 book chapters.

Chretien earned a Bachelor of Science degree in political science from the United States Naval Academy, Master of Health Science in biostatistics and Doctor of Philosophy in genetic epidemiology degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in general preventive medicine at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and fellowship in health sciences informatics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. Antonio Eppolito is a family physician and flight surgeon with 27 years clinical experience in the outpatient, inpatient and deployed environment while serving on active duty.
He is currently the Air Force Medical Service (AFMS) Chief of Telemedicine for the USAF Office of the Surgeon General. He manage a $19M budget finding varied sources of funding from Congressional grants to research partnerships with university partners. He supervises a staff of four in all aspects of the government acquisition cycle: executing programmatics, contracting & resourcing initiatives, resulting in an expansion of the telehealth program over the past 11 years to 33 initiatives in 15 different specialty areas. He fosters working relationships with clinical functional groups and addresses community of interest needs to bring latest technology to the field. He designed the world’s largest digital radiology image archive and deployed a virtual radiology network with dynamic workload allocation to fix a radiologist manning crisis projected to save the AFMS $2.7M annually. He created 22 computer based training tools where upon providers learn competencies in telehealth technologies such as VTC use, virtual reality, virtual world therapy for PTSD, phobias and addictions. He brought endoscopic storage & transmission solution images/videos/reports to the ENT specialty, saving the AFMS $987K annually. He augmented flier readiness at 238 flight medicine clinics by deploying the world’s largest archive of cardiology studies linked to the Aeromedical Consultation Service at WPAFB. He facilitated access to remote care areas and expanded access to DoD/VA patients by chartering a joint DOD/VA Telehealth group to write federal tele-healthcare policy and governance. Most successfully he championed the first AFMS eConsult service, Project ECHO, which grew to 11 specialties across the DOD/VA with a projected 10% drop in referrals to save the AFMS $10M annually. Moreover, as an adjunct to his primary care role, he enrolled 5000 AD runners in an Efficient Running program, a longitudinal research study that has reduced running injuries by 30% and lessened the primary care clinic burden projected to save the AFMS $5.8M annually.

Dr. Mitch Heroman is a neonatologist and the Chief Medical Officer for OptumServe, the UnitedHealth Group platform that provides information and technology-enabled health services to the Federal health market including the Military, VA, and CMS. As CMO, he has medical oversight of quality and health care delivery including the MHS Global Nurse Advice Line and the 3 VA Community Care Network contracts.

He is very interested in value-based care and coordinates telehealth for OptumServe. Most recently from 2013-2017, he was CMO for UnitedHealthcare Military & Veterans (UHCM&V), the managed care support contractor for TRICARE West Region. He has expertise in healthcare delivery, in demand forecasting, demand and capacity management, and in mitigation strategies for any gaps. He has consulted in over 250 Military clinics and service lines since 2004, first as VP, Health Plan Design and Management, TriWest Healthcare Alliance and then as CMO, UHCM&V. His military medicine background is extensive and diverse including assignments at Naval Medical Center, San Diego as Deputy Commander, Chief of Staff, TRICARE Management Activity (TMA), Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, Commanding Officer, Naval Hospital, Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, CA and Force Surgeon, Commander, Surface Forces, U.S. Pacific and Atlantic Fleets.

Mr. Drew Koerner is the Medical/SLED CTO in ServiceNow’s Healthcare Practice.

Mr. Koerner has over 20 years in information systems experience, with 15 years of that time in Healthcare IT (HIT) and 15 years in solutions, development and strategy for healthcare IT.

Drew helped has created a number of solutions designed to help doctors and nurses proved better outcomes and in the end, provide better patient care. Mr. Koerner came from Malcolm Baldrige winning Poudre Valley Health System where he was responsible for the server, storage, security, architecture and virtual environment.

Additionally, he assisted in building VMware’s healthcare vertical from early 2011 to 2018 including a number of impactful healthcare solutions including in depth expertise with Epic, MEDITECH and Cerner. This continues at ServiceNow with solutions like physician onboarding, eliminating EMR outages and securing patient data. His 15+ years of healthcare knowledge on the provider side helped a multi-hospital system across multiple states as well as many other customers across the country on their journey through their patient care journey.

Dr. Simon Pincus is the chief of the Defense Health Agency’s Connected Health Branch, Clinical Support Division, Medical Affairs.

Connected Health is the branch of the Defense Health Agency responsible for reviewing, evaluating, coordinating, and integrating the use and development of health technology supporting Military Health System beneficiaries.These technologies include telehealth, mobile apps, mobile web, virtual reality, augmented reality, and wearable devices.

Dr. Pincus comes from the Army’s Regional Health Command-Pacific, where he was responsible for execution of behavioral health programs spanning eight time zones. In that role, he led tri-service behavioral health efforts to optimize the MHS GENESIS electronic health record, represented the Department of Defense at the Veterans Affairs’ EHR-Modernization workshops, and presented at the Annual Cerner Health Conference.

His civilian service includes director, Installation Behavioral Health, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and chief, Behavioral Health, Madigan Army Medical Center (the Army’s largest behavioral health department); chief, Tele-Behavioral Health, Western Region Medical Command; and chief, McChord Mental Health.

Dr. Pincus is the recipient of the Superior and Commander’s Awards for Civilian Service and led teams that received the Madigan Swan Award for Teamwork for two consecutive years.

Dr. Pincus retired from the U.S. Army as a Medical Corps officer in 2008 after 25 years ofservice, having had the opportunity on active duty to lead at many levels.

As director of Psychiatry and the Combined Family Medicine/Psychiatry Programs, Dr. Pincus was responsible for the education of residents at Tripler Army Medical Center. During Operation Joint Endeavor, Dr. Pincus commanded the 84th Combat Stress Control Detachment, the first-ever fully deployed CSC unit.

Dr. Pincus’ military awards include the Order of Military Medical Merit, the Legion of Merit, the Meritorious Service Medal (6th Award), the Army Commendation Medal (2nd Award), and the Army Achievement Award (3rd Award), and the Expert Field Medical Badge.

Dr. Pincus received his bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University and his medical degree from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He completed his psychiatric residency at Letterman Army Medical Center, and his fellowship training in psychopharmacology at the University of Colorado.

Dr. Pincus has several publications on combat and operational stress. His paper on “The Emotional Cycle of Deployment: A Military Family Perspective” has almost 500 citations and has been widely referenced during redeployment briefings.

Dr. Pincus grew up in New York, Toronto, Canada, and London, England. In England, he successfully completed 11 Ordinary “O” Level examinations from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and London. He remembers his time in England fondly due to Harry Potter and the “Owl” Exams.

Melissa Harris is a staff writer and researcher for GovernmentCIO Media & Research, where she covers federal health and defense IT and co-hosts HealthCast.

Prior to joining the team in October 2019, Melissa worked as a technology reporter for MeriTalk, where she covered IT acquisition, Congressional hearings, and federal technology reports and events. She was also a local news reporter for the New Jersey Hills Media Group, the Editor-in-Chief at The Oberlin Review, and an intern reporter at Homeland Security Today.

Melissa earned her Bachelor of Arts in history and English at Oberlin College.

Amy Kluber is editor-in-chief of GovCIO Media & Research. Previously she managed two aviation publications at B2B media company Access Intelligence. She was nominated for The Innovation in Aerospace Journalism & Publishing Award for launching and hosting an aviation podcast. Prior to that she wrote news scripts and produced videos for the network Newsy. Follow Amy on Twitter: @amykluber

She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Having traveled around the world since an early age, she grew up a U.S. Army brat born in Vicenza, Italy, and spent most of her youth living in Seoul, South Korea.

In her free time, you may find her at Disney World.

Kate Macri is a deputy editor for GovCIO Media & Research, where she primarily covers the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

Prior to joining the team in June 2020, she covered the video game industry and small businesses for Zenger News. She also covered banking and finance news for Banking Dive, a B2B media publication based in Washington D.C., and reported logistics, supply chain and shipping news for Supply Chain Dive.

If she isn’t boxing or walking her boxer, you can find Kate with her nose in a Stephen King novel, slaying monsters in the world of Final Fantasy or waiting for a blue public call box to land in her front yard.