about us
We are engaging front line clinicians and healthcare professionals in an active grass roots process of advocacy and action toward an improved healthcare system. The initiative is called the Better Health Initiative.

Our approach is to use “middle out” leadership in order to cultivate a more unified, cohesive voice and develop solutions to drive systematic healthcare change.

Board of Directors:
  Charles Kilo MD, MPH, Executive Director
  Eric Larson MD, MPH
  Susan Edgman-Levitan PA
  Daniel Wolfson
Charles Kilo Dr. Kilo is the Executive Director of The Trust for Healthcare Excellence (The Trust) and the CEO of GreenField Health. The Trust is a non-for-profit whose mission is to promote the collective efforts and conditions necessary for health and health care excellence.

Chuck is a Senior Faculty of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement where he was previously Vice President. In that capacity, he started and ran the international Idealized Design of Clinical Office Practices initiative which helped to trigger a national focus on ambulatory care redesign in the late 1990s. Chuck works regularly with the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), and others on issues pertinent to health care quality and medical practice performance improvement. He is on the Board of Directors for Kryptiq Corporation a leading provider of healthcare connectivity and workflow software. He is also on the board of the Foundation for Medical Excellence and TransforMED, LLC - a subsidiary of the AAFP formed to drive practice performance improvement. He is on the advisory board for the ACP’s Center for Practice Innovation.

Dr. Kilo works with major medical groups and health systems across the US on topics such as health care quality and safety, health system design, health care information technology, and medical practice performance improvement. Along with Dr. Mark Leavitt , Chairman of the Certification Commission on Health Information Technology, Dr. Kilo authored the book Medical Practice Transformation with Information Technology published in 2005 by the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS).

He is a practicing general internist with subspecialty training in infectious diseases. He attended Washington University School of Medicine where he also completed his internal medicine training. He subsequently completed an infectious diseases fellowship and Master of Public Health at Harvard University.
Eric Larson Dr. Eric Larson is Executive Director of Group Health’s Center for Health Studies. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he trained in internal medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, in Boston, completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars and MPH program at the University of Washington, and then served as Chief Resident of University Hospital in Seattle.

Dr. Larson served as Medical Director of University of Washington Medical Center and Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs from l989-2002. His research spans a range of general medicine topics and has focused on aging and dementia, including a long running study of aging and cognitive change set in Group Health Cooperative - The UW/Group Health Alzheimer's Disease Patient Registry/Adult Changes in Thought Study. He has served as President of the Society of General Internal Medicine, Chair of the OTA/DHHS Advisory Panel on Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders and was Chair of the Board of Regents (2004-05), American College of Physicians. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine.
Susan Edgman Susan Edgman-Levitan, PA, is Executive Director of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior to coming to MGH, she was the founding President of the Picker Institute. She is a Lecturer in the Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and an Associate in Health Policy, Harvard Medical School. A constant advocate of understanding the patient’s perspective on healthcare, Susan has been the co-principal investigator on the Harvard Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) study from 1995 to the present. She has served as Chair of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) Breakthrough Series Collaborative on Improving Service Quality, and is the IHI Fellow for Patient and Family-Centered Care. She is an editor of Through the Patient’s Eyes, a book on creating and sustaining patient centered care, The CAHPS Improvement Guide, and has authored many papers and other publications on patient-centered care. She is a co-author of the Institute of Medicine 2006 report, The Future of Drug Safety: Promoting and Protecting the Health of the Public.

Ms. Edgman-Levitan serves on several boards and national advisory committees, including the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, the National Patient Safety Foundation, and the Harvard Institute for Nursing Leadership, and has co-chaired the Annual NPSF Congress on Patient Safety since 2002. Ms. Edgman-Levitan is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Duke University Physician Assistant program where she received the Distinguished Alumni award from the Duke Physician Assistant Program and was inducted into the Duke University Medical Center Hall of Fame in 2004. Ms. Edgman-Levitan was awarded the 2007 Leadership and Innovation award from the Center for Information Therapy. She lives in Chestnut Hill, MA with her husband, Richard, and daughter, Amelia.
Daniel Wolfson Mr. Wolfson is the Executive Vice President and the Chief Operating Officer of the ABIM Foundation in Philadelphia. He joined the Foundation in May 2001. The Foundation’s focus is on professionalism, advancing participation of individual physicians in assessment and quality improvement activities and developing research initiatives to advance physician quality.

Mr. Wolfson served for nearly two decades as the founding president and CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans (formerly The HMO Group), the nation’s leading association of not-for-profit and provider-sponsored health plans. During his tenure, Mr. Wolfson earned national recognition for spearheading the development of the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS), convening the RxHealthValue coalition to provide independent information on the pharmaceutical industry, and co-sponsored with American College of Physicians the journal Effective Clinical Practice.

Prior to becoming the founding president and CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, Mr. Wolfson was the Director of Planning and Research at the Fallon Community Health Plan. During that time, he led the product development team that launched the nation’s first Medicare risk contract with the Health Care Financing Administration.

Mr. Wolfson received his Bachelor’s in Sociology from Boston University and his Master’s in Health Sciences Administration from the University of Michigan, School of Public Health.