Global Health Institute

Meena Seshamani’s diverse background as a health care executive, health economist, physician, and health policy expert has given her a unique perspective on how health care policy and operations impact the real lives of patients. As deputy administrator and director of the Center for Medicare at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, she stood up the historic Medicare Drug Price Negotiation program, which in its first year successfully negotiated the first 10 high-cost drugs with an estimated savings of $6 billion. As vice president of clinical care transformation at MedStar Health, she served on the senior leadership of the 10 hospital, 300+ outpatient care site health system. Her work to rapidly scale senior services, palliative care, and community health initiatives as part of leading the health system’s COVID-19 efforts was nationally recognized. In this conversation she will share insights from her work as a transformative leader, clinician, and published researcher.

This event is hosted through Georgetown University’s Conversations in Health: Global to Local class, which invites global health professionals to Georgetown’s campus to engage in discussions regarding their career paths and expertise. John Monahan guides the structured conversation, and the discussion is open to all Georgetown University faculty, students, and staff.

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Meena Seshamani, M.D., Ph.D., most recently led the Medicare program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As deputy administrator and director of the Center for Medicare at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Seshamani led a nearly 1,000-person team through historic transformation. She drove bold initiatives including transforming the Physician Fee Schedule to pay for more holistic care including community health services, care navigation, caregiver training, and behavioral health that is integrated with primary care; she led efforts to streamline prior authorization in Medicare Advantage (MA) and rejected more than 1,500 misleading T.V. ads to ensure that MA serves its 33 million enrollees. Dr. Seshamani is a Hopkins-trained surgeon and Oxford-trained Ph.D. economist, where she was a Marshall Scholar. Prior to joining CMS, she served as vice president of clinical care transformation at MedStar Health, where she conceptualized, designed, and implemented population health initiatives. She also cared for patients as a head and neck surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. Her work is routinely published in journals including New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs, and has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Politico, Stat News, and most major TV news networks.

John T. Monahan, J.D., is a senior advisor to the Georgetown University Global Health Institute, a professor in the Department of Medicine, a senior fellow at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and a senior scholar at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law.