Leadership

Aimee F. Dacanay is a self-motivated professional with strong customer service skills and a wide range of nursing specialties. She demonstrates the ability to communicate & educate effectively, through building strong working relationships with hospital staff, clients & their caregivers, medical & administrative staff, & students, both as groups and individuals.

Her nursing career started in 2003 in the Operating Room (OR). She worked in several DC area hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an OR nurse until accepting a Cardiovascular Operating Room (CVOR) RN position at Suburban Hospital Johns Hopkins Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland in 2006. There, Aimee was recruited to help with the start-up of the NIH Heart Center and the Thoracic Robotics Program.

Aimee further pursued a RN Informatics Analyst position at Carroll Hospital a LifeBridge Center in Westminster, Maryland in 2011. Since then she has managed full life cycle clinical system install projects, including the build, implementation, provider training, Go Live Support and maintenance of new clinical systems. She has strong customer service skills and enjoys working to bridge the gap between the Healthcare Provider and Information Systems to better her community’s overall healthcare.

A long time entrepreneur, Gail has delivered a variety of ground-breaking services over her career. As founder and CEO of Kinergy Health she built a health management platform to support patient self-management of care in partnership with their clinicians. Prior to founding Kinergy Heath, she was a director of business development at America Online bringing new technologies to consumers unused to relying on technology to simplify everyday activities.

Merrily Evdokimoff has 35+ years nursing experience, primarily in community and public health. She has been a direct service provider, manager and chief executive officer. She is currently the owner of M & J Associates, a consulting firm providing support to home care agencies, non-profits and IT companies involved in improving the care of patients.

She has a BS in Nursing from University of Michigan, a MS in Community Health Nursing from Boston University and most recently received a PhD in Nursing from Boston College.

Ann Grillo has over 20 years of experience advising and counseling health care providers in a variety of areas including HIPAA compliance, employment, risk management, claims, medical malpractice, physician contracting and other transactional matters.   A graduate of University of Maryland School of Law, Ann was a partner at a premier Maryland law firm where she worked with a range of health care providers including HMOs, senior living facilities, hospitals and physician groups.

Ann has represented clients in mediation, arbitration, and before professional licensing boards, trial and appellate courts.  She has lectured to numerous professional groups – physicians, nurses, social workers and hospital administrators on a wide variety of topics including compliance, medical records documentation, and managing risk.

In addition to her legal, compliance and transaction experience, Ann brings to Kinergy both insight and passion for discovering and implementing innovative ways to improve patient care and communication.

Blake has over a decade of experience leading development effects in start-up and institutional settings. Specific areas of focus include new product/market launches, corporate partnerships, intellectual property, in-and-out licensing, business modeling and venture financings, and government relations.

Blake’s primary focus has been in health technology, but his experience also includes co-generation energy, tech-education platforms, specialty pharma, e-commerce, and agro-tech. He received degrees in Entrepreneurship/Venture Management and Marketing from the University of Oklahoma.

Megan is a driven, detailed-oriented, young professional who is just getting her feet wet in the perfect storm that is healthcare reform. She has a BS in Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University and nearly five years of administrative experience under her belt in the healthcare technology industry. She has been lucky enough to work alongside such an accomplished and experienced team and is learning a lot along the way.

Megan’s interest in this field really sparked when her mother was diagnosed with Stage 3 Colon Cancer in 2012. She was faced with many challenges trying to get information and advocate on her behalf. This was magnified when Megan was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in August, 2016 at the age of 27. She began to see firsthand that there was a huge communication barrier between patients and their caregivers. KinergyCare is very near and dear to her because of this and she fully stands behind everything they are doing.

Larry Lu, Founder and CEO of OpenConcept Systems, Inc., focuses on developing large scale web applications and mobile applications in the area of web content management, healthcare collaboration and coordination, and mobile conference management.

Prior to OpenConcept Systems, he was vice president of technology at AOL for over 16 years, responsible for core infrastructure systems, AOL platform, and later entire suite of AOL’s web applications.

Larry Lu received a BS in mathematics, MS in mechanical engineer, and was Ph.D candidate for computer graphics and computer human interaction at George Washington University. He is a holder of 13 US patents

A long time entrepreneur, Gail has delivered a variety of ground-breaking services over her career. As founder and CEO of Kinergy Health she built a health management platform to support patient self-management of care in partnership with their clinicians. Prior to founding Kinergy Heath, she was a director of business development at America Online bringing new technologies to consumers unused to relying on technology to simplify everyday activities.

Doug is a driven, results-oriented company founder, executive and leader in the healthcare technology, services policy and law. He leverages this capability to develop and grow exciting new companies. An entrepreneurial company founder and CEO with a strong track record of success, Doug has a proud history of challenging conventional thinking and disrupting markets via innovative health care technologies and solutions.

He spent the first fifteen years of his career gaining a strong foundation in healthcare and technology as a health policy lawyer in Washington, DC. This experience offered a powerful vantage point from which he learned the complexities of healthcare. Doug also developed a keen understanding of how to effect regulation, reimbursement and policy changes, and how these tactics can strategically and profoundly effect a company’s trajectory.

Uniting this foundation, passion for technology, and creative, system-based solutions to improve care delivery, he founded/co-founded two venture-backed companies and continues to work with early stage companies to help them succeed through effective strategic positioning, business development and capital raising efforts.

Robert C. McDonald, MD, MBA is the President and Founder of Aledo Consulting, Inc. Prior to this role, he served in a variety of senior medical and operations positions at Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield and its predecessor company, The Associated Group, including Medical Director of Medical Policy, Medical Director of Anthem Prescription Management, LLC and Medical Director of Health Care Management, Anthem Inc. Among his responsibilities at Anthem were the creation and contracting of the first network of national scope for hemophilia factor and immunoglobulin providers. Prior to Anthem, he served for three years at Eli Lilly and Company as a Health Economics Research Physician performing cost effectiveness analyses both as part of developmental trials and on site at health plans across the United States. Dr. McDonald received his Medical Doctor degree from University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and his Masters of Business Administration from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business.

Danny Sands is passionate about healthcare transformation, non-visit based care, collaboration in healthcare, and participatory medicine. He spent six years at Cisco, most recently as CMIO, where he provided both internal and external health IT leadership and helped key customers with business and clinical transformation using IT.

He has earned degrees from Brown University, Ohio State University, Harvard School of Public Health, and trained at Boston City Hospital and Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. Dr. Sands currently holds an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School and maintains a primary care practice in which he makes extensive use of health IT (much of which he helped to introduce during his tenure at Beth Israel Deaconess).

Sands is the recipient of numerous health IT awards, has been elected to fellowship in both the American College of Physicians and the American College of Medical Informatics, and is a founder and co-chair of the board of the Society for Participatory Medicine. In 2009, he was recognized by HealthLeaders Magazine as one of “20 People Who Make Healthcare Better.”

Rick Toren is an accomplished entrepreneur with extensive experience in hospital systems and medical device development. He is currently an investor in, and Chief Strategy Officer of, QPID Inc., a software-as-a-service-provider. Developed at Mass General Hospital, QPID offers a platform and clinical applications to accelerate the utility of electronic health records, and is already in use by over 5,000 clinicians.

Previously, Rick as the Founder, Chairman and President of CodeRyte, a software firm that offers physicians and hospitals an automated method of extracting billing codes from transcribed clinical records through advanced NLP (natural language processing) technology. The firm was started in 1998 and was sold in April 2012 to 3M Corp for $150million.

Rick began his career at McGaw Labs (a subsidiary of American Hospital Supply) and then joined Survival Technology Inc., a pharmaceutical device development company. As Product Manager for emergency care products, Rick developed a series of products and created an international network of distributors, increasing revenue from zero to $12million over 3 years. Later, as VP of Sales and Marketing, Rick developed and marketed 24-hr ECG recording devices and helped the government’s HCFA (Health Care Financing Administration) establish reimbursement guidelines for these new products.

As founder and CEO of Promedco Inc., Rick managed and owned outpatient imaging centers in five states; he also managed physician practices in six specialities. When Promedco was sold to Vivra in 1994 for $13 million, Rick became President of the newly formed Vivra subsidiary, Vivra Heart Partners. There he grew their medical management business from zero to $55 million and acquired 65 physician cardiology practices.

Rick later founded and served as president of e-Medx, a software company that provided tools to payors and at-risk providers of medical management services. When the company was sold to ActiveHealth Management, Rick ran the CareSystems Division, providing case management services through six different insurance companies to 2 million covered lives. (ActiveHealth Management was recently sold to Aetna for $400 million. Later, as President and COO of QED Solutions, Inc, Rick directed that software firm’s growth in marketing data analysis software for pharmaceutical companies.

Rick attended Penn State University and received a BS in marketing. He also attended the Loyal Graduate School of Business executive MBA program.