Allan Coukell is Director of Policy and Strategic Communications for The Prescription Project, which is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to promote appropriate prescribing and address the conflicts of interest in medicine caused by pharmaceutical industry marketing. He studied pharmacy at the University of Manitoba and worked as a clinical pharmacist, specializing in cancer treatment and supportive care, at Victoria Hospital in London, Ontario. He later held the role of senior medical writer with the medical publishing company Adis International. He established a weekly health and science program on Radio New Zealand in 1999 and subsequently worked in US public radio, most recently as health and science reporter at WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. He has contributed to numerous NPR programs, the BBC World Service, The Economist and the New York Times, and has been adjunct faculty at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. He is the winner of several journalism awards, including an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2007 for hard news reporting.

Adam J. Fein, Ph.D., is founder and president of Pembroke Consulting, Inc., a Philadelphia-based management advisory and business research firm. Dr. Fein is one of the country’s foremost experts on pharmacy economics and the pharmaceutical supply chain. He provides strategic advisory services to a diverse mix of clients, including pharmaceutical manufacturers; pharmacy benefit managers; supply chain technology companies; law firms; health care providers; trade associations; and institutional investors. Dr. Fein has published over 100 academic and industry articles, authored or edited nine books, and currently writes the popular blog DrugChannels.net. He is frequently sought by the media for his industry expertise and has been quoted in many leading national publications. He serves as the first Fellow of the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence and is on the Advisory Boards of Supply Chain Equity Partners, Secure Symbology, IntegriChain, and Pharmaceutical Commerce magazine. Dr. Fein earned his Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Brandeis University. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and their two children.

Nick Jacobs is president of Windber Medical Center and the Windber Research Institute, a translational medicine proteomic and genomic research institute which focuses on heart, breast and reproductive diseases. Before being named to his current positions, Mr. Jacobs served as the Chief Communications Officer of the Conemaugh Health System; Executive Director for the Conemaugh Health Foundation; Vice President of Mercy Medical Center; Executive Director of the Mercy Healthcare Foundation, President of the Laurel Highlands Convention and Visitors Bureau; Executive Director of Laurel Arts of Somerset, PA; Teacher and Department Chair for Westmont and Johnstown Schools; for the Plum Borough School District in Pittsburgh; and was a professional trumpet player. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Management/Health Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He serves on numerous board, has received various professional awards, and his writings have appeared in many national healthcare magazines.

John Mack is president of VirSci Corporation, a publishing company and consultancy that specializes in pharmaceutical marketing best practices, social network marketing, permission-based e-mail, and privacy consulting. VirSci Corporation owns and operates Pharma Marketing Network™, a B2B portal website that brings together pharmaceutical marketing professionals from manufacturers, communications companies, and marketing service providers for wide ranging discussions and education on a multitude of current topics. John is also a consultant to the industry on matters of privacy, vendor assessments, and ehealth trends affecting the pharmaceutical industry. John is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Pharma Marketing News, an independent monthly electronic newsletter focused on issues of importance to pharmaceutical marketing executives. He is also an accomplished blogger, having created Pharma Marketing Blog to which he often contributes commentary on topical pharmaceutical marketing issues. Pharma Marketing Blog was cited recently in the Wall Street Journal as a blog “insiders read to stay current.”

Scott MacStravic, Ph.D., is semi-retired after a 35-year career as a hospital and health system executive, a professor and consultant on hospital planning, healthcare marketing and PHM. He is the author of 10 books and more than 500 articles on these subjects.

Peter Pitts is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a think tank on public health care policy issues and Senior Vice President, Director for Global Health Affairs for Manning Selvage & Lee. From 2002-2004 Peter was FDA’s Associate Commissioner for External Relations, serving as senior communications and policy adviser to the Commissioner. He supervised FDA’s Office of Public Affairs, Office of the Ombudsman, Office of Special Health Issues, Office of Executive Secretariat, and Advisory Committee Oversight and Management. He served on the agency’s obesity working group and counterfeit drug taskforce. His comments and commentaries on health care policy issues regularly appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Health Affairs, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun Times, The San Francisco Examiner, Investor’s Business Daily, The Baltimore Sun, The Economist, Nature Biotechnology, The Journal of Life Sciences the BBC World Service, Fox News, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, among others. His book, Become Strategic or Die, is widely recognized as a cutting edge study of how leadership, in order to be successful over the long term, must be combined with strategic vision and ethical practice. He is the editor of the new book, Coincidence or Crisis, a discussion of global prescription medicine counterfeiting. He has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Butler University. A graduate of McGill University, he is married to Jane Mogel, and has two sons.

Mark Senak is an attorney with over twenty years of experience offering a blend of law, communications, public health and public relations. He has designed communications campaigns and built coalition grassroots support efforts targeting public health and health policy issues at state, federal and global levels. His work has focused on primary areas related to health policy – public health and medical product development, with an emphasis on regulatory approval and reimbursement strategies. In arenas of public health, he has designed global communications plans for clients such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as public health communications plans in the U.S. for organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is currently at Fleishman-Hillard and prior to that was the National Director of Health Policy at Manning, Selvage & Lee. He obtained the bulk of his public health and communications experience in HIV during my combined 14-year tenure with AIDS Project Los Angeles and prior to that with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York, the two largest HIV service providers in the nation. In addition, he has authored numerous articles as well as three books examining issues of law, health policy and HIV as well as the rights of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community.

David Williams, who blogs regularly at the Health Business Blog, is the co-founder of health care strategy firm MedPharma Partners, serving clients in technology-enabled health care services, pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, and medical software. Before co-founding MedPharma Partners he worked for ten years in the health care practice of the Boston Consulting Group and as an independent consultant. Earlier he was a strategy consultant at the LEK Partnership. David holds a BA in Economics from Wesleyan University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with First Year Honors. He is Chairman of the Board of medical risk management company Advanced Practice Strategies and also serves on the boards of ECG biomarker company iCardiac Technologies and the Hearts and Noses Hospital Clown Troupe, which provides professionally trained volunteer clowns to children facing serious illnesses.

SupplyScape Contributors

Lucy Deus works with customers to help them develop their supply chain security strategies. Drawing on a deep knowledge of drug distribution processes, state and federal regulatory expertise, and extensive experience in technology interoperability and document security, she works with customers to identify options and recommendations best suited to their technical, operational and business needs. She is a 15-year technology leader, having directed the development of global distributed business applications for Seagate Technologies, Morgan Stanley, and MITRE Corporation. Lucy served as editor of the EPCglobal Drug Pedigree Messaging Standard, collaborating with participants from across the supply chain and leaders of other working groups that resulted in the development and ratification of the new standard in just over a year -considered lightning speed for any open industry standard. She was the recipient of the GS1 EPCglobal’s Software Action Group (SAG) Person of the Year award in 2007.

Shabbir Dahod collaborates with industry leaders to uncover new business opportunities and drive consensus on the development of business models and industry standards that deliver tangible long term value for companies across the life sciences value chain. Through his vision of a collaborative information network providing precise and timely product, transaction, and demand visibility, Shabbir seeks to help companies increase patient safety and maximize revenue. His blueprint for a safe and secure trade ecosystem based on pedigree value chain master data helps drive a unified product strategy and partner ecosystem. A 20-year enterprise software veteran, Shabbir led the vision for transforming the pharmaceutical industry through an industry-wide standard approach to combat counterfeiting and diversion threats. He has partnered with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, wholesalers, pharmacies, and organizations such as the MIT Auto-ID Lab on creating approaches to secure the supply chain and thereby improve patient safety. Shabbir was a senior executive in the Paul Allen group of companies, has obtained several patents and was a senior leader at Microsoft.

Dirk Rodgers is responsible for leading SupplyScape’s involvement in industry standards initiatives, and has spent more than 20 years as a technology and operations strategist in pharmaceutical supply chain collaboration and systems integration. Prior to SupplyScape, he was a senior systems architect for supply chain solutions at Cardinal Health, where he was responsible for developing Cardinal’s ePedigree strategy. Over the past five years, Dirk has spearheaded numerous EPCglobal standard work groups, made up of industry stakeholders and solution providers. He is co-chairman of the EPCglobal Software Action Group (SAG) Drug Pedigree Messaging Working Group. He also served as co-chair of the Drug Pedigree Messaging Joint Requirements Group (JRG) and co-chairman of Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) Track & Trace Working Group, and was an active member in the HLS Information, Process, and Serialization work groups.

Peter Spellman confers with customers to understand their needs and conceive of technology solutions that move beyond compliance to deliver maximum business value. Peter delivers ground-breaking innovations in supply chain security and data visibility which significantly improve patient safety and address the data security requirements of the pharmaceutical supply chain industry. An industry leader for 17 years in highly scalable, mission critical applications, Peter led secure distributed collaboration innovations at The MITRE Corporation serving intelligence and military organizations, and designed next-generation collaboration infrastructures at Microsoft. Working with tier-one manufacturers, wholesalers and retail pharmacies to understand their business needs, he designed the approach for electronic pedigrees and led the development of the world’s first electronic pedigree solution. He architected the RFID EPC authentication service now used throughout the pharma supply chain.