Perseverance in Health Policy: The Road to Reforming the U.S. Health System
Department and Center Events
About the Event
The Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research in the Department of Health Policy and Management is hosting its annual Sam Shapiro Lecture. This year, Elizabeth Fowler, PhD, JD, will be giving the keynote speech.
About the Speaker
Elizabeth Fowler, PhD, JD, is the Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation at CMS. Fowler previously served as Executive Vice President of programs at The Commonwealth Fund and Vice President for Global Health Policy at Johnson & Johnson. She was special assistant to President Obama on health care and economic policy at the National Economic Council. From 2008 to 2010, she was Chief Health Counsel to Senate Finance Committee Chair, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), where she played a critical role developing the Senate version of the Affordable Care Act. She also played a key role drafting the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA). Dr. Fowler has over 25 years of experience in health policy and health services research. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where her research focused on risk adjustment, and a law degree from the University of Minnesota. She is admitted to the bar in Maryland, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Dr. Fowler is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Aspen Health Innovators Fellowship and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2022.
About Sam Shapiro
In the 1960s, Sam Shapiro was Director of Research at a health maintenance organization, the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, when he became interested in the application of mammography for screening women and reducing mortality from breast cancer. At the time, mammography was little used and its effect little known, and health maintenance organizations were not popular. His study, conducted with Philip Strax, would ultimately change medical thinking about one of the most dreaded diseases.
By the 1970s, after he had published his widely heralded work, mammography had become commonly used to diagnose and treat breast cancer at the earliest possible stage. As a researcher in the field of public health policy, he spent his career studying the effectiveness of medical treatments in large populations. Though trained as a mathematician, he became a nationally known biostatistician and epidemiologist. He arrived at Johns Hopkins in March 1973 as Director of the Health Services Research and Development Center (HSRDC) in the School of Public Health and soon began attracting hundreds of students.
Shapiro regarded as one of the most popular professors at the East Baltimore campus. He is remembered as a humble man who rarely raised his voice and let his decades of research speak for him. He employed a dry wit to lighten a heavy discussion. In 1988, Mr. Shapiro became the first nonphysician to receive the Charles E. Kettering-General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Prize, a top medical honor. The judges lauded his research that "almost unilaterally changed medical thinking about early detection" of breast cancer. He wrote or co-wrote more than 200 scientific articles, among them a 1968 study of childhood mortality, a 1969 analysis of coronary heart disease and a 1985 article on low birth weight. He was a member of many professional organizations and was elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.
