Our Leadership Team

Bob Burgin CEO

Bob Burgin

CEO

Bob brings over thirty years of leadership experience to his position as CEO at Amplifire. Bob founded the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance, a collaboration of hospital systems dedicated to improving patient care and reducing the incidence of avoidable harm by eliminating confidently held misinformation. Bob brings Alliance members together with the common goal of reducing patient risk and clinical variation. Outcomes data proves that clinical variation can be overcome when health systems employ the right tools with a collective will to solve problems together.

JK Hullet, CFO

JK Hullett

CFO

JK brings 25 years of financial and operational experience. He worked in corporate and business development at American Airlines, and was CFO of @Last Software before it was acquired by Google and CEO of Net Identity before it was acquired by Tucows. JK is a Principal at Lacuna Gap Capital, an investment group that supported Amplifire through early-stage product development and market implementation. Mr. Hullett oversees all financial activity, from contract development, renewals, and negotiations, to patent filings and legal compliance matters.

Bryan Bushick MD, GM & Chief Healthcare Innovation Officer

Bryan Bushick MD

GM & Chief Healthcare Innovation Officer

Bryan brings over thirty years of healthcare experience to his responsibility for expanding and serving the Amplifire Healthcare Alliance. A seasoned executive and consultant, Bryan applies insights from previous roles that include COO at DocSite, interim CMO with Prominence Health Plan, enterprise-wide quality leadership as System VP at Allina Health, and relationship building with customers and partners as SVP of Business Development at CareScience. Bryan also had tenures with United Healthcare/Medica and Towers Perrin after initiating a career devoted to population health, patient safety, and performance improvement.

Nick Hjort, Chief Product Officer

Nick Hjort

Chief Product Officer

Nick brings over twenty years of technical leadership driving teams to deliver products quickly and efficiently. Nick’s experience has ranged from large companies like MediaNews Group, where he was the VP of Technical Operations, providing senior leadership on the platform powering 75 daily newspaper websites, to small companies like Indigio, where he served as the Director of Engineering and helped grow the organization from 12 to 90 employees. Nick has also been active in the startup community where he launched a mobile app company prior to joining Amplifire where he oversees all aspects of product design and development.

Kristie Invie VP, Client Solutions

Kristie Invie

SVP, Client Solutions

Kristie is a highly accomplished and dynamic client solutions executive with a proven track record of success in cultivating and nurturing long-term client relationships. With over 20 years of experience across provider and technology environments, Kristie brings a wealth of expertise to her role. 

Currently, Kristie holds a pivotal position at Amplifire, where oversees Client Solutions.  She spearheads teams responsible for ensuring timely and hassle-free deployments, ensuring that customers are delighted with their experience setting the foundation for a long-term relationship. In addition to this role, Kristie serves as a thought leader for various strategic priorities such as Quality & Safety, Nursing Competencies and Workforce Development.  

Bryan Merchant VP, Software Engineering & IT Operations

Bryan Merchant

VP, Software Engineering & IT Operations

Bryan has over twenty-five years of technical and leadership experience driving excellence in teams to create development and operations efficiency. He has guided companies ranging from Staples and Otterbox to GHX, where he built teams to support development, reporting, and operations environments. As the Director of IT at Datalogix, now owned by Oracle, Bryan provided leadership to the teams supporting online, direct mail, and mobile services. Building from these business experiences, Bryan is currently leading all aspects of Development, Support, and Operations at Amplifire, where he provides senior expertise working across the organization.

Dan Morley, Executive VP, Sales & Client Operations

Rebecca Kaufman

VP, Marketing and Communications

Rebecca is a seasoned marketing and go-to-market expert who thrives on empowering her colleagues and teams to achieve greatness. She brings over 15 years of experience spanning healthcare consulting, product marketing, and B2B marketing domains. With a keen eye for detail and a strategic mindset, Becca oversees Amplifire’s marketing function, leading initiatives spanning brand strategy, communications, demand generation, product marketing, and content marketing. Becca has an MBA from Columbia University and a BA in economics and political science from Washington University in St. Louis. 

Matthew Jensen Hays, Ph.D. VP, Research and Analytics

Matthew Jensen Hays, Ph.D.

VP, Research and Analytics

Matt has over twenty years of experience analyzing and enhancing how people learn and remember. His Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology is from UCLA, where he worked with Drs. Elizabeth and Robert Bjork. He has conducted research on memory and learning and applied those findings to the design of training systems, intelligent tutors, multi-million-dollar simulators, and other educational experiences for civilian and military applications. His published articles have been cited hundreds of times and nominated for or won Best Paper awards at several conferences. Matt ensures that Amplifire is constantly improving its ability to accelerate learning and impede forgetting.

Laura Jensen Controller

Laura Jensen

VP, Accounting

Laura is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a Masters degree in Accounting. With over twenty-five years of accounting experience, she has mainly focused on high-tech start-up companies that have produced products ranging from spectrometers to circuit boards to injection molding machines. Her last position was as CFO for a respiratory products company, where she upgraded their ERP system to streamline their financial reporting.

Her responsibilities at Amplifire include financial reporting, accounting, audit management, GAAP and tax compliance, and privacy compliance. In addition to her accounting duties, she oversees HR and benefits administration.

Laura Jensen Controller

Ann Lerner

Managing Director, Accounting & Professional Services

Ann is a trusted and passionate leader, joining Amplifire after a decades-long career at Deloitte as a Managing Director. In her tenure with Deloitte, she led client teams driving revenue and relationships and at the world’s largest companies. As a Chief of Staff, she led transformational initiatives, operations, and strategy for a $20B organization. She has a passion for leadership development and has created new leadership frameworks, implemented training to shift culture, and facilitated sessions for leaders at all levels at Deloitte University. Ann leads Amplifire’s Accounting and Professional Services vertical, including a recently launched Accounting and Professional Services Alliance.

Our Science Advisory Board

The Science Advisory Board continually reviews, validates, and enhances the methodology and algorithms of the Amplifire platform.

Robert Bjork, PhD, UCLA

Robert Bjork

PhD, UCLA

Bob is UCLA’s former Chair of Psychology and past president of the Association of Psychological Science. He is a pioneer in understanding the role of desirable difficulties, testing effects, and the counterintuitive nature of learning. Bob’s primary goal is to promote learning and memory performance in educational settings through the investigation of principles in cognitive psychology. The work of Bob and his wife Elizabeth form the basis of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, David and Goliath.

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Elizabeth Bjork, PhD, UCLA

Elizabeth Bjork

PhD, UCLA

Elizabeth is the Co-principal investigator of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Laboratory at UCLA. Her work has shown the public that forgetting is not the unfortunate tendency of a limited system; rather, it is the consequence of an adaptive one. Most people are inaccurate in measuring their own knowledge through judgments of learning because they mistakenly rely on the immediate access to knowledge in order to determine the long-term memory retention and the transfer of such knowledge to different contexts.

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Dan Schacter, PhD, Harvard

Dan Schacter

PhD, Harvard
Dan is Harvard’s former Chair of Psychology. He has written 300 scientific articles and eight books including The Seven Sins of Memory, The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, and Psychology a university-level textbook. Research in the Schacter memory lab is concerned with understanding the nature and function of human memory using cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging approaches. Current topics of interest include: memory distortion, the role of memory in imagining the future, counterfactual simulation, and enhancing online learning.

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Rich Mayer PhD, UCSB

Rich Mayer

PhD, UCSB

Rich is UCSB’s former Chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. For fifteen years, Educational Psychology ranked him the “most productive educational psychologist in the world.” His research interests are in applying the science of learning to education, with current projects on multimedia learning, computer-supported learning, and computer games for learning. His research is at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and technology, with a focus on how to help people learn in ways so they can transfer what they have learned to new situations.

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Roddy Roediger PhD, Washington University at St. Louis

Roddy Roediger

PhD, Washington University at St. Louis

Roddy is Washington’s former Chair of Psychology and Chair of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society. Roddy explores various topics in human learning and memory such as educational applications of cognitive psychology, eyewitness memory, metacognition, memory illusions, people with highly superior memory and collective memory. These are diverse topics but are held together by each representing a central and interesting topic in the study of human learning and memory. He is the author of Make It Stick and over 175 research papers.

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Kathleen McDermott, PhD, Washington University at St. Louis

Kathleen McDermott

PhD, Washington University at St. Louis

Kathleen is a Professor of Psychology at Washington University who investigates human memory encoding and retrieval and how they interact. She is well known for her research on how human memory is encoded and retrieved, with a specific interest in how false memories develop. In collaboration with Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III, she developed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm used to study the phenomenon of memory illusions

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Chad Lane, PhD, University of Illinois

Chad Lane

PhD, University of Illinois

Chad is a professor at the University of Illinois and is interested in the foundational theories and practices of educational psychology, including learning and development. His research seeks to build advanced learning environments that reap the benefits of timely and appropriate guidance. Chad is known for developing educational technologies that are as compelling and engaging as the very best social media apps, video games, or movies.

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Robert Birnbaum PhD, MD, Vice President of Professional Development & Implementation Science at Mass General Brigham

Robert Birnbaum

PhD, MD, Vice President of Professional Development & Implementation Science at Mass General Brigham

Bob is the Director of Continuing Professional Development at Partners Healthcare and an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Birnbaum is the founding Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy and the founding Executive Director of the MGH Academy. Bob is a practicing psychopharmacologist who has studied education methodology and impact, developed courseware, and managed large-scale medical education efforts.

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Clinical Innovation Advisory Board

The Innovation Advisors are some of the most prestigious, accomplished thought leaders in American healthcare, helping target and develop course content and strategic direction in the evolving healthcare landscape.

Brent C. James MD Clinical Professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University School of Medicine and Chairman, Amplifire Innovation Advisory Board

Brent C. James MD

Clinical Professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center, Stanford University School of Medicine and Chairman, Amplifire Innovation Advisory Board

Brent is known internationally for his work in quality improvement, patient safety, and the infrastructure that underlies successful improvement efforts, such as culture change, data systems, payment methods, and management roles. For six of the seven years it has been in existence, Brent has been named among Modern Physician’s “50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare,” and among the “100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare” for five years in Modern Healthcare.

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Maureen Bisognano MD President Emerita and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

Maureen Bisognano MD

President Emerita and Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)

Maureen served as IHI’s President and CEO for five years, after serving as Executive Vice President and COO for 15 years. She is a leading authority on improving health care systems, whose expertise has been recognized by her election to the National Academy of Medicine). Maureen is also an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities.

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Terry Fairbanks MD, MS, Vice President, Quality and Safety, Medstar

Terry Fairbanks

MD, MS, Senior Vice President and Chief Quality and Safety Officer, Medstar

Terry has contributed more than 120 publications to the healthcare quality and safety, human factors engineering, and medical literature, and he co-edited a book on cognitive systems engineering in healthcare. He has served in national and international roles, including the National Patient Safety Foundation Board of Advisors, the POLITICO Health IT Advisory Forum, AHRQ Patient Safety Network Technical Expert Advisory Panel, and he is a Health Research and Educational Trust (HRET) Senior Fellow.

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Peter Pronovost MD, PhD, FCCM, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Peter Pronovost

MD, PhD, FCCM, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at University Hospitals, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Peter is a global thought leader, informing US and global health policy. He is world-renowned as a patient safety champion, critical care physician, and a prolific researcher, publishing over 800 peer review publications. According to Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, Pronovost’s “work has already saved more lives than that of any laboratory scientist in the past decade.” In 2008 Time Magazine named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world. That same year, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

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Lucy A. Savitz PhD, MBA, Director, Center for Health Research and Vice President, Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Northwest

Lucy A. Savitz

PhD, MBA, Director, Center for Health Research and Vice President, Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Northwest

Lucy is a health services researcher with extensive experience translating scientific findings into clinical practice. As director of the Center for Health Research, she oversees the work of about 35 investigators and 255 staff members at CHR’s offices in Portland, Oregon. Nationally, Dr. Savitz serves on the Methods Council, Delivery System Science Fellowship Program Committee, and chairs the Committee for Advocacy in Public Policy at Academy Health. She is a member of the Center for Medicare and Medicare Services Executive Leadership Council.

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