• Our Team

Leadership

Robert Palmer, MBA

CEO, Founder, Data Scientist

Robert Palmer is the CEO of PotentiaMetrics. He has over 20-years of experience in developing analytic models for healthcare payers and providers, life sciences, professional sports, financial services, private equity, and manufacturing. Robert is best known for developing models to define individualized clinical and economic outcomes for cardiac surgery, home health care, and cancer. He developed outcomes models used by many of the largest medical technology companies and top academic centers. Robert’s work with Sorin Group defined the clinical and economic value of Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery. His work with Medtronic defined the reduction of complications and associated costs for using cerebral oximetry in cardiac surgery. Robert worked as a researcher and consultant at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, where he co-developed models for personalized cancer care. His work has been published in Harvard Health Policy Review and Becker’s Hospital Review. He has received awards and honors from GuideWell Innovation, the American Cancer Society, Predictive Analytics World Conference, and South by Southwest. Robert was adjunct faculty at Washington University in St. Louis Olin School of Business top-ranked Entrepreneurship Program from 2007-2013. He is the founder and co-founder of several companies. He holds an MBA from Washington University, Olin School of Business, and a BS in Business Administration from Regis University. He is a member of the YPO (Young Presidents Organization) and is currently the Education Chair for the Healthcare Network.

Sandra Van Trease, MBA, CPA, CMA

Senior Director

An accomplished Executive and Board member, Ms. Van Trease has 20 years of experience serving on boards of directors for public companies (NYSE & NASDAQ) and private, higher education, and community organizations. She recently retired in 2020 as Group President, BJC HealthCare, and the President of BJC HealthCare‘s ACO, LLC. Areas of focus included hospital and medical group operations, population health, and value-based care, leading BJC’s virtual care development and co-leading digital transformation initiatives. BJC HealthCare, with $6B in revenues, is a clinically integrated healthcare system in St. Louis, Missouri. Ms. Van Trease also established and served as the senior executive of BJC Collaborative LLC, an organization of seven Midwest regional health systems.

Her professional career includes serving as President & CEO of UniCare Inc., a WellPoint company, with $2 billion in revenues (NYSE: WLP) and as President, COO & CFO, RightChoice Managed Care, Inc. (NYSE:RIT), with $1.8 billion in revenues. Prior to her roles with RightChoice, she served clients across multiple industries during her 12 years with Price Waterhouse.

Ms. Van Trease serves on the board of Enterprise Financial Services Corp. - NASDAQ: EFSC, a $9 billion multi-regional business bank (Audit Chair, Comp committee, Executive committee); she previously served on the boards of Peabody Energy - NYSE: BTU, a Fortune 500 international energy company (Audit Chair, Health, Safety & Environment Chair, Nominating & Governance committee, Executive committee) and RightChoice Managed Care - NYSE: RIT, a health insurance company (non-independent director)

Van Trease earned her master’s degree in business administration from Washington University in St. Louis, and her bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She is a certified public accountant and a certified management accountant. In 2004, she received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Missouri–St. Louis for achieving distinction in her field and for contributing to the betterment of the university and the St. Louis community.

Jerry Henderson, MD MBA FACP

Chief Medical Officer

Dr. Henderson is responsible for the development and management of the firms’ clinical data registries analytics platforms. He is also Chair of both the Informatics Governance and the Inpatient Clinical Informatics Committees at MD Anderson. Dr. Henderson is a distinguished innovator. In his time at MD Anderson, he designed and implemented the Oncologic Emergency Medicine fellowship, the first of its kind in the world, as well as a software program called Zero-G, receiving him the Innovator of the Year Award in 2013. His special interests include emerging technologies like AI, machine-learning, deep learning, to support and improve patient care. Dr. Henderson earned his medical degree from Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and completed his residency at University of Texas Galveston. He has continued education, earning an MBA from Rice University, and attended the Harvard Business School Executive Education Value Measurement in Healthcare program.

Sal Calta

Senior Director

Sal brings extensive experience in information technology and business transformation. Sal was a Senior Executive at IBM (most recently the VP of Business Transformation), retiring in 2015 after a successful 36-year career that included product development, supply chain, business transformation, and information technology. Sal then served as the interim CIO at Florida Blue, focusing on healthcare innovation, successfully applying years of his business transformation experience. Sal is also on the advisory board for the Mercy College MBA program, is an advisor to Astia (a non-profit organization that provides guidance and support for women entrepreneurs), has recently served on the board of the Dutchess County Regional Chamber of Commerce, and is the chair of the executive volunteer leadership board of the New York Blood Center. Sal earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Mike Fleming

Chief Commercial Officer

Mike has more than 20 years of experience leading the marketing, business development, and customer experience teams within post-acute care, specialty managed care, and hospital systems. Most recently, he served as Chief Marketing Officer for Amedisys, one of the nation’s largest providers of home health and hospice care. During his tenure at Amedisys, Mike built multiple programs and products to drive sales effectiveness, informed patient decision making, and employee engagement, effectively transforming the go-to-market strategy and resulting in a 4x increase in hospice census. Prior to his tenure with Amedisys, Mike served as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Magellan Health and Vice President of Marketing for VistaCare Hospice. Mike also has more than 10 years of experience in marketing leadership for multi-hospital health systems in California and Kentucky. Mike earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Relations and Speech Communication from California State University, Fresno.

Technical Advisory Board

Barton Hamilton, PhD

Economics and Econometrics

Bart directs the healthcare management program at Washington University, Olin Business School in which professors from both the medical and business schools teach courses to both business and non-business majors. In addition to being an expert on healthcare economics, he also has expertise in entrepreneurship, and has directed the Hatchery Entrepreneurship Program at the Olin Business School. Before joining Olin, Barton was an assistant professor of economics at McGill University for five years. He brings to PotentiaMED both publications and an extensive expertise in evaluating surgeon performance, surgeon costs and cost volatility, and the impact of surgeon specialization on patient outcomes. He earned his PhD in Economics from Stanford University and an A.B., Economics, with honors, from University of California, Berkeley.

Gregory Mayhew, PhD

Decision Modeling, Valuation

Greg has extensive experience in advanced technology development and production. He has managed design departments and implemented numerous start-up technical and business divisions. Greg holds five patents that cover multiple technologies and seventeen technical publications. He holds a Doctorate in Information Theory and Discrete Mathematics from the University of Southern California. He earned his Master of Business Administration with concentration in finance and operations management and Master of Finance with concentration in asset pricing and econometrics from Washington University in St. Louis, Olin School of Business. He also holds a Master of Science in Digital Communications from the University of Southern California. Greg completed his Bachelor of Science in Electronics (with a minor in economics) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a professor of finance with St. Louis University, Cook School of Business.

S. Joshua Swamidass, MD, PhD

Data Science

Josh is both a physician and a scientist, appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Washington University School of Medicine, where he is focused on using machine learning and predictive modeling to discover new medicines and new uses for existing medicines. He brings PotentiaMetrics specific expertise in solving medical problems with purpose-designed machine learning and modeling methods. This builds from his medical training and his Ph.D.training in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is one of the few computationally trained physicians in the country. His collaborators and consulting engagements have included the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT, Pfizer, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson).

Clinical Advisory Board

James L. Cox, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Cox trained in Cardiothoracic Surgery under Dr. David Sabiston at Duke University, where he remained on the faculty as an Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor of Surgery. Dr. Cox subsequently became the first Evarts A. Graham Professor of Surgery and Chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, a position he held for 14-years. In July of 2000, he retired as the Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Georgetown University Medical Center. On July 1, 2006, Jim became the Emeritus Evarts A. Graham Professor of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine. He has been the President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, Editor of the Seminars in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Editor of Operative Techniques in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Chairman of the Residency Review Committee for Thoracic Surgery, a Director of the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and a member of the Surgical Study Section at the NIH. Dr. Cox is best known for his work in the field of cardiac arrhythmia surgery and the development of the Cox-Maze Procedure which is considered the “gold standard’ for the treatment of atrial fibrillation. Dr. Cox has trained many prominent surgeons in America, Europe and Asia and has served as the Guest Lecturer, Visiting Professor or Guest Surgeon over 200 times and in over 30 countries. Dr. Cox was honored in Paris, France as one of only thirty “Pioneers in Cardiothoracic Surgery” for the First 50 Years of the Specialty. In April 2005, Dr. Cox joined Dr. Michael DeBakey as only the second American cardiac surgeon ever elected into the Russian Academy of Medical Science.

Robert Farmer, MD

Clinical Advisor

Currently serving as Medical Director for the Southern Illinois Division of HSHS Medical Group, Dr. Farmer has over twenty years of experience in family medicine. Dr. Farmer attended Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and completed a family practice residency at Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, Indiana.

Keith Fleming, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Fleming is a founding member and president of Tejas Anesthesia in San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Fleming completed his medical training at Baylor College of Medicine, and residency at UT Health Center in San Antonio. Dr. Fleming is a Diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology and belongs to the San Antonio Division of the American Board of Anesthesiology.

Preethi H. Gunaratne, PhD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Preethi Gunaratne brings extensive experience in genomics, analytics and personalized medicine. Following a stint as Assistant Director of the Baylor College of Medicine DNA Diagnostic laboratory. In 1999 she joined the International Human Genome Project through which she directly contributed to the sequencing and annotation of Human Chromosomes 3, 12 and X. In 2000 she was appointed Director of gene (cDNA) sequencing at the Baylor Human Genome Sequencing Center (Baylor-HGSC). In 2005 she lead her team to make the largest single contribution of 15,000 sequences each to the National Cancer Institutes’ (NCI) Mammalian Gene Collection (MGC) in Phase I and the National Institute for Diabetes & Digestive Kidney Disease (NIDDK) - Stem Cell Genome Anatomy Project (SCGAP). Dr. Gunaratne joined the University of Houston in 2006 and went on to establish one of the first comprehensive functional genomics platforms to rationally define genetic signatures that accurately stratify and predict responsive and non-responsive host genomes to externally administered microRNAs and drugs. She collaborated with teams from Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) to pioneer methods for discovering strong tumor suppressor microRNAs for ovarian, colorectal, metastatic breast, skin and kidney cancers, multiple myeloma, and pediatric neuroblastoma and osteosarcoma. Through this work Dr. Gunaratne’s group has also established a framework for defining unique microRNA-regulated gene signatures that can be used for personalizing cancer treatments based on underlying genetic mutations in tumors as defined by Whole Exome or Whole Genome sequencing (WES or WGS). To rapidly translate their findings into clinical practice Dr. Gunaratne co-founded NEXTmiRNA Technologies a company dedicated to harnessing tumor suppressor microRNAs as the Next Generation cancer drugs – acting as circuit breakers of multiple oncogenic pathways driving cancer. Preclinical work for a tumor suppressor microRNA for ovarian cancer.

Jonathan Heinlen, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Heinlen is a board-certified urologist with fellowship training in Urologic Oncology and minimally invasive surgery. He specializes in the treatment of urologic cancers, with a particular focus on prostate and kidney cancer. In addition to cancer, Dr. Heinlen offers minimally invasive solutions for complicated urinary stone disease and benign prostatic hypertrophy. Dr. Heinlen elected to pursue medical training at the University of Oklahoma and continued on in urology residency in Oklahoma. He then trained at the City of Hope National Cancer Center in Los Angeles.

Dr. Heinlen has a particular interest in improving the way physicians interact with their patients to create better healthcare outcomes. This includes a focus on cost-efficiency, patient-centered decision making, and evidence-based practice. Dr. Heinlen has ongoing research studies in urologic clinical practice and also participates in multiple cancer trials.

Henrikas Juknis, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Juknis has over twenty years of experience practicing nephrology and internal medicine. Dr. Juknis graduated medical school at Kaunas Medical Institute and completed a residency at Brown University School of Medicine in Providence, Rhode Island. He went on to serve as a fellow at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis.

George Lundberg, MS, MD, ScD (hon)

Clinical Advisor

George Lundberg, MS, MD, ScD (hon) is an American board-certified pathologist, speaker, writer, and editor. Dr. Lundberg is the former (1982-1999) Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and he is currently the Editor in Chief of Cancer Commons; Editor at Large, at Medscape, a Clinical Professor of Pathology at Northwestern University, and President and Board Chair of The Lundberg Institute. Dr. Lundberg served as President of the American Society for Clinical Pathology; Professor of Pathology at University of Southern California for 10 years; and for 5 years was Professor and Chair of Pathology at the University of California, Davis. A frequent lecturer, radio, and webcasting guest and host, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Lundberg was also a professor at Harvard from 1993 to 2008 and at Stanford from 2006 to 2018. Dr. Lundberg is a Vietnam Era Veteran, having served in the US Army for 11-years, leaving active duty as a Lieutenant Colonel.

Michael Papagikos, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Papagikos is a radiation oncologist in Wilmington, North Carolina specializing in the management of lung and prostate cancer. He is very committed to offering and conducting high-quality clinical cancer research in the community setting and underserved populations through physician initiated and national cooperative group studies. He is affiliated with the New Hanover Regional Medical Center and serves as the Director of the Multi-Disciplinary Lung Program. He received his medical degree and residency training from Wake Forest School of Medicine.

Luis Rodriguez, MD

Clinical Advisor

Dr. Rodriguez is a practicing oncologist with 18 years of experience and a special interest in gastrointestinal and breast cancers. He completed his bachelor degree at the University of Michigan, and medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where was awarded membership to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. Dr. Rodriguez completed his residency and fellowship in medical oncology and hematology at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

David Theodoro, MD

Co-founder and Clinical Advisor

Dr. Theodoro is a co-founder of PotentiaMED and is a developer of the company’s analytics products for cardiac surgery. Dr. Theodoro brings substantial clinical and cardiac surgery practice management expertise. Dr. Theodoro is a practicing cardiothoracic surgeon, chief of cardiac surgery for one of the largest heart surgery programs in the Midwest at SSM Hospital System, St. Louis and president of a medical service business. He has broad experience in program development, team integration, and contract negotiations. Dr. Theodoro completed Cardiothoracic Surgery training at The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He finished General Surgery training at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.