Lewis A. Lipsitz, MD
Chief, Division of Gerontology
Co-Director, ECHO-CT, Division of Gerontology
Lewis A. Lipsitz, M.D., is chief of the Division of Gerontology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also director of the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife (HSL), where he holds the Irving and Edyth S. Usen Chair in Geriatric Medicine. Dr. Lipsitz serves as principal investigator of the ECHO-Care Transitions program funded by AHRQ. His research focuses on the mechanisms and management of falls and the relationships between cognition and mobility in older adults.
Amber Moore, MD, MPH
Co-Director, ECHO-CT
Hospitalist, Hospital Medicine Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital
Associate Inpatient Physician Director for Operations, Department of Medicine
Instructor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Moore has been involved with the ECHO CT program since 2015. As a hospitalist, she has led the weekly clinic sessions and developed and implemented the transitions curriculum for the hospital medicine team. Currently she leads the day-to-day operations for the program. In addition to her leadership of the program and commitment to improving transitions of care, Dr. Moore is passionate about medical education. She works as a hospitalist at MGH where she continues to teach residents and medical students and holds a leadership role on the department of medicine’s operations team.
Lauren Junge-Maughan
Program Manager
Lauren Junge-Maughan serves as the Program Manager for the ECHO-CT program. In this role, she oversees the weekly program activities, expansion to BI Needham and looks for ways to add value, tools and services to the project. Lauren has a strong background in healthcare quality improvement and management having served in similar roles at Harvard Medical School and the University of Michigan Health System. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Health Science from Michigan State University.
Evan Gwyn, MD
Hospitalist Facilitator
Dr. Gwyn has worked as a hospitalist at BIDMC since 2012. He attended medical school at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, LA, and he completed his residency in internal medicine at BIDMC. In addition to his clinical work as a hospitalist, his interests include hospital logistics and operations, utilization review, and quality improvement. He serves as a member of the Utilization Review Committee, and he oversees quality improvement efforts in the Clinical Research Center. He is also a member of the executive committee of the BIDMC hospitalist program.
Marisa Jupiter, MD
Hospitalist, ECHO-CT, Department of Medicine
Dr. Marisa Jupiter works as a hospitalist in the division of General Internal Medicine at BIDMC. She completed her medical residency at the University of Massachusetts where she spent an additional year as Chief Resident. Dr. Jupiter serves as one of the Core Education Faculty in the Department of Internal Medicine Residency training program at BIDMC. She is also the coordinator for the hospital medicine CME series, Seminars in Hospital Medicine. Dr. Jupiter is one of our facilitators for our weekly ECHO-CT session.
Anita Vanka, MD
Associate Program Director, Internal Medicine Residency Program
Dr. Anita Vanka is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Hospitalist in the Department of Medicine & Division of General Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She completed the Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education in 2012 and during this year, developed a novel Transition in Care curriculum for medical residents. This curriculum involves introducing medical interns to the risks of transitioning patients out of the hospital and to the different levels of post-acute care services patients may require post discharge. As part of this curriculum, interns review and perform root-cause analysis on their individual readmitted list of patients, while the junior and senior residents lead an ECHO-CT session as part of their Geriatrics rotation.
Brett Simchowitz, MD
Hospitalist, ECHO-CT, Department of Medicine
Dr. Brett Simchowitz attended Harvard University, completed his MD/MPH in the University of California system, and trained in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital before joining Beth Israel Deaconess in 2017. He works primarily in Boston as a Hospitalist, providing direct care to general medicine patients in addition to supervising and educating medical students and trainees on the teaching service. Dr. Simchowitz’s non-clinical efforts focus predominantly on patient safety and quality of care, and his research has addressed issues surrounding medication safety, infection control, diagnostic delays, and disparities in cancer care.
Kristen Knoph, PharmD, BCPS
Clinical Pharmacist, ECHO-CT, Department of Pharmacy
Kristen Knoph is a clinical pharmacist in the Department of Pharmacy at BIDMC. She serves as the pharmacist at the weekly ECHO-CT sessions. She completed her PGY1 residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and her PGY2 Pharmacotherapy residency at Mayo Clinic.
Julie Lima, MPH, PhD
Brown University
Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research
Julie Lima holds an M.P.H. from Boston University with concentrations in social and behavior sciences and epidemiology/biostatistics and a PhD in sociology with a concentration in population studies from Brown University. She has been with the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research at Brown University since 2002 serving in various roles, most recently as a faculty member. She is the Center’s expert on data compliance and human subjects research regulatory matters. Substantively, she has collaborated with national leaders on grants in the areas of unmet need for care for people living with functional limitations in the community; quality of care at the end of life; culture change practices in U.S. nursing homes, and post-acute care among Medicare beneficiaries.
Tom Travison, PhD
Hebrew Senior Life
Marcus Institute for Aging Research
Dr. Travison is Senior Scientist and Director of the Biostatistics and Data Science team at the Marcus Institute. He co-directs the Interventional Studies in Aging Center at Marcus, leads the Biostatistical Design and Analysis Core at the Boston Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, and is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His data science laboratory focuses on the development and dissemination of tools facilitating rigorous and reproducible observational and interventional research in aging.
Alyssa DuFour, PhD
Hebrew Senior Life
Marcus Institute for Aging Research
Dr. Dufour completed her training in biostatistics at Boston University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her methodological expertise is based in cluster analysis of unstable longitudinal patterns of disease progression. She has received the Scientist Development Award from the American College of Rheumatology, Rheumatology Research Foundation; through this mechanism, she lead investigations of body composition remodeling in aging and its role in the epidemiology of foot disorders utilizing data from the Framingham Foot Study. Dr. Dufour has much collaboration both within the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research and at outside institutions.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) developed ECHO-Care Transitions (ECHO-CT) to address gaps in care quality arising when a patient transitions from the inpatient hospital setting to skilled nursing facility (SNF). The goal is to promote safe and effective transitions for complex older patients by improving communication between the hospital and the SNF providers. 