Jake is a certified improvement practitioner with experience building healthcare quality improvement capability across the globe. He has developed improvement training programs, staff engagement platforms, and leadership organizational structures that have served major institutions such as Stanford University Medical Center in California, University of Kansas Medical Center, the All India Institute for Medical Sciences in New Delhi, and AIC Kijabe hospital in Kenya. Through these experiences he coached hundreds of health care improvement projects and witnessed the application of improvement methods for diverse healthcare challenges.

Michelle DeNatale, MSc is the Executive Director of Operations and Strategic Programs for the Chief Medical Office at Stanford Health Care.  Michelle is known for leading interdisciplinary teams to develop innovative solutions to improve clinical performance in hospital and ambulatory care settings to improve the value of patient-centered care. Her work at Stanford includes the creation of the Stanford Coordinated Care model for patients with ongoing chronic health conditions as well as the activation and facility design of over 14 specialty clinics including the Stanford Byers Eye Institute and Hoover Pavilion.  She is the founding Administrative Director of the Stanford Clinical Effectiveness Leadership Training (CELT) and is a Global Health Fellow for Stanford Medicine Center for Innovation.  Over the past 6 years she has worked to build clinical improvement collaboratives with improvement teams across India, Australia, Kenya and Ethiopia.  Michelle has more than 12 years experience leading strategic planning and implementation initiatives within healthcare specializing in population health, health benefit design and physician engagement strategies.  Michelle holds a Master’s of Science in Health Policy & Management from Harvard University.

Dr. Karleen Giannitrapani is the Co-Director of the VA Quality Improvement Resource Center for Palliative Care, supporting VA Geriatrics and Extended Care programs nationally, and a Core Investigator at the VA Center for Innovation to Implementation. She is also an Instructor at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Stanford “d.school”.  Her research focuses on improving care quality and processes for patients facing serious illness. She has a PhD in Health Policy and Management, a Masters of Public Health and a Masters of Arts in African Studies. 

Dr. Karl Lorenz, MD MSHS is a general internal medicine and palliative care physician, and Section chief of the VA Palo Alto-Stanford Palliative Care Program. Formerly at the VA Greater Los Angeles, Dr. Lorenz directed palliative care research at the VA Center for Innovation to Implementation and served on the faculty at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Lorenz is a member of the VA’s national Hospice and Palliative Care Program (HPC) leadership team, director of the operational palliative care Quality Improvement Resource Center (QuIRC), and adjunct facility staff member at RAND. Dr. Lorenz’s work and leadership has been influential to the field of palliative care research. Under Dr. Lorenz’s leadership, since 2009 the Quality Improvement Resource Center (QuIRC) has served as one of three national leadership Centers responsible for strategic and operational support of the VA’s national hospice and palliative care programs. QuIRC develops and implements provider facing electronic tools for the VA’s national electronic medical record to improve the quality of palliative care. In that role, Dr. Lorenz participates with the national leadership team in strategic planning, policy development, and providing resources to support operational efforts. Dr. Lorenz has contributed to the field of global palliative care, serving the World Health Organization in its development of Palliative Care for Older People and leading methods for Palliative Care Essential Medications.