Faculty of the healthcare industry graduate certificate | Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Carol Beirne has over 27 years of experience at Abbott Laboratories in a variety of quality leadership roles, most recently as a senior manager in the Corporate Quality Organization. She has worked in both the pharmaceutical and medical device product areas. Beirne designed the management review procedure for the Diagnostics Division and represented the process and data to both internal and external auditors, including ISO and FDA. She has a bachelor of science in engineering that allowed her to be extensively involved in process improvements throughout her career. She led a division Quality Training staff in the Global Pharmaceutical Research and Development organization with employees in both Germany and the US. She has an ASQ Quality Manager/Operations Excellence Certification and has served in multiple roles in CAPA investigations. Beirne earned her International MBA from Keller Graduate College of Management.

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Stanley Bouma is a senior manager of R&D Risk Management in Abbott Laboratories molecular diagnostics division and is responsible for maintaining risk management as an integral part of the Quality System. He joined Abbott in 1982, and has had experience in research, technology assessment, validation quality, product development, and risk management. He has presented on risk management at national conferences. Before joining Abbott, he was a research associate at MIT. Bouma received a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University. He has 14 patents.

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Currently teaching:
American Health Care System

Andy Chang is an interdisciplinary environmental engineer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Headquarters Office of Air Quality Planning & Standards based in the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His duties comprise of developing policy and advising Regional Offices for how to best address states' requirements under the Federal Clean Air Act. Prior to joining the EPA's RTP office, Andy spent six years in the Great Lakes Regional Office in Chicago, Illinois. Andy's professional interests include population health, and one of his early research posts with Northwestern University's Department of Preventive Medicine aimed to correlate incidents of atherosclerosis caused by exposure to air pollution with different ethnic groups. He is the recipient of the 2010 Trudy A. Speciner Non-Supervisory Award for Advancing Environmental Protection. Andy was in the inaugural class of students in the MMI program at its inception in 2006. His thesis was entitled, "Discrete Event Simulations: Benefits, Analysis, and Implications of Dedicated Fast Track Settings in an ED Setting". He also holds a BS in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University.

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Robert Lechton is a senior quality manager at Baxter Healthcare, where he is responsible for quality compliance for medical products including areas of design control, risk management, and life cycle management. Lechton has been involved in all aspects of product development from early concept, to product launch, and throughout the management of fielded products. He previously was the quality manager for Bosch Rexroth’s Electric Drives and Controls division. Lechton received a MS of Engineering from University of Maryland with a focus on reliability engineering and risk management and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Bradley University.

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Raymond Robinson is an informatics and reporting senior manager at Philips in the research and development department working to extend Telemedicine across the healthcare continuum. His research interests include patient safety, healthcare quality improvement and Telemedicine. He concurrently holds an adjunct professorship with University of Maryland Baltimore County. Prior to these positions he began his medical research training working with Dr. Peter Pronovost’s team at the Johns Hopkins Quality and Safety Research Group (QSRG) on his international, On the CUSP: STOP BSI campaign. Since that time Robinson has authored several manuscripts and book chapters around healthcare quality improvement and patient safety. Robinson received his MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine while also pursuing an MPH in clinical investigation, biostatistics and epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health where he completed a thesis study on “Airway Management by a Difficult Airway Response Team." Robinson then became interested in the business of healthcare and quality improvement, so took time out to pursue an MBA degree at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

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Elizabeth Zurek has practiced health care law for over twenty years, including several years with the health law department of a large Chicago based corporate law firm. For the past 16 years, she has served as in-house counsel for several Chicago area health care providers, including academic medical centers and community-based hospitals. Currently, she is in private practice, where she primarily provides services to the in-house legal staff of Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Cadence Health. Her broad-based health care practice is concentrated on reimbursement, corporate and regulatory/compliance issues. In her capacity as general legal advisor to several non-profit health care providers, she regularly counsels individuals at all levels of the organization, including senior management and clinical personnel, about their legal obligations and practical methods of ensuring compliance. Zurek received her JD from Loyola University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Law Review. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the Illinois Association of Health Care Attorneys (for which she served as a director) and the Illinois State Bar Association, where she has been appointed a member of the Health Care Section Council.

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