Team: Steering Committee Leadership

Harold P. Freeman, MD

Harold P. Freeman Patient Navigation Institute

Honorary Chair

National Navigation Roundtable Harold P. Freeman, M.D. is president and CEO of the Harold P.Freeman Patient Navigation Institute in New York City. He is Professor of Surgery Emeritus, Columbia University and previously served as Director of Surgery at Harlem Hospital and Professor of Clinical Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Freeman is a diplomat of the American Board of Surgery and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Freeman is founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention and founder and Medical Director of the Breast Examination Center of Harlem, a program of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was the first director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities and served as Associate Director of the NCI for a five-year period ending in 2005. He served as national president of the American Cancer Society in 1988-89 and he was the chief architect of the American Cancer Society’s initiative on Cancer in the Poor.

The American Cancer Society established the Dz Harold P. Freeman Award dz in 1990 to recognize his work in this area. Dr. Freeman pioneered the patient navigation concept and model which addresses disparities in access to timely diagnosis and treatment, particularly among poor and uninsured people. Based on this model the Patient Navigator and Chronic Disease Prevention Act was signed into law by President Bush in 2005. Dr. Freeman was appointed by Presidents George Bush and Clinton to serve as Chairman of the United States President’s Cancer Panel for an 11-year period.

He is a Lasker Laure ate, and received the Lasker Award for Public Service in 2000 for Dz enlightening scientists and the public about the relation-ship between race, poverty and cancer”. In 2015, Dr. Freeman was named a “Giant of Cancer Care” by OncLive.

«
»

Andrea Dwyer, BS

University of Colorado

Vice Chair

National Navigation Roundtable Andrea (Andi) Dwyer is the Co-Director of the Colorado Colorectal Screening Program at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and Program Director at the Colorado School of Public Health. She has worked for nearly ten years in the area of cancer survivorship and colorectal cancer prevention. Andi is also an instructor for the Colorado Patient Navigation Training.

Andi is the Co-Chair of Scientific and Evidence Based Health Interventions and a Steering committee member of the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable. She also serves as the Director of Health Promotion for Fight Colorectal Cancer, focusing on research and patient education. Ms. Dwyer is honored to serve as the Co-Chair for the National Patient Navigator Roundtable of the of the American Cancer Society.

«
»

Tracy Battaglia, MD, MPH

Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health

Chair, National Navigation Roundtable

Dr. Battaglia is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health where she is Interim Chief of the Section of General Internal Medicine. She also serves as the Director of the Women’s Health Unit, a national Center of Excellence in Women’s Health where she has achieved national recognition for improving the health of vulnerable women at risk for delays in care. As a practicing internist and breast health specialist at Boston Medical Center, the largest safety net medical center in New England, her approach to health disparities focuses largely on engaging the community as partners in the research process.

She has 17 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating community-engaged Patient Navigation programs to reduce delays across the continuum of cancer care, including co-leading the Boston site of the NCI’s national Patient Navigation Research Program in which we recruited over 3,000 participants from Boston’s low-income populations accounting for nearly 30% of the data to the national database. The American Cancer Society and the Patient Center Outcomes Research Institute support her research to study innovations in the delivery of patient navigation for low income cancer patients.

As Director of the Community Engagement Program for the Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Award, she is leading a cooperative study funded by the National Center to Advance Translational Science (NCATS) in partnership with the four Massachusetts Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA)hubs (Boston University, Harvard University, Tufts University and University of Massachusetts) to support a City-wide dissemination study to reduce breast cancer disparities through a patient navigation network. Dr. Battaglia is also long-time volunteer leader for the American Cancer Society, where she recently served as Chair for the New England Division Board of Directors.

»