As our speakers get confirmed we will post their photos and biographies here.
Speakers Biographies
John P. Hirdes, Ph.D. 
Professor and Ontario Home Care Research and Knowledge Exchange Chair,
Department of Health Studies and Gerontology, University of Waterloo &
Scientific Director, Homewood Research Institute
Dr. Hirdes is the senior Canadian Fellow and a Board Member of interRAI, an international consortium of researchers from 29 countries. He chairs the interRAI Area Network of Canada, a collaborative network of researchers and graduate students from across Canada. Dr. Hirdes led interRAI efforts to create the Mental Health and Community Mental Health assessment systems, the System for Classification of In-Patient Psychiatry, the Method for Assigning Priority Levels in home care, and Home Care Quality Indicators (as co-PI). He is a member of the interRAI committee that produced the new suite of instruments and care planning protocols. He has also recently been appointed to the Board of the Seniors Health Research Transfer Network (SHRTN).
Dr. Hirdes has over 100 publications in peer reviewed journals and academic book chapters. His primary areas of interest include geriatric assessment, mental health, health care and service delivery, case mix systems, quality, health information management, social determinants of health, and quantitative research methods. He is currently leading a $2.5 million Canadian study to update the Resource Utilization Groups (RUG-III) case mix systems for nursing homes.
John N. Morris, Ph.D., holds the Alfred A. and Gilda Slifka Research Chair at the Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, where he serves as co-director of the Institute for Aging Research and the director of Social and Health Policy Research. Among his primary research interests are issues relating to comprehensive assessment developing quality indicators, long term care, functioning, cognition, and clinical conditions.
With collaborators in interRAI and HSL, he has developed Quality Indicators for use in long term care, post acute care, and home care. Dr. Morris was the Task Leader for the federally mandated CMS project to develop the nursing home MDS and Resident Assessment Protocols. He was also the Principal Investigator in the development of the MDS Version 2.0. In interRAI he has co-authored the RAI-HC system for evaluating the needs, strengths, and preferences of elderly clients of home care agencies, as well as the RAI system for post-acute care.
He is an interRAI Board Member and serves as chairman of the Instrumentation System Development Committee (ISD). With his ISD Committee members he has led the development of the interRAI Clinical Assessment Protocols (CAPs) for use in many settings, including home care, long term care, etc.
Brant E. Fries, Ph.D. is a Professor of Health Management and Policy and Research Professor at the Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan, and Chief of Health Systems Research for the Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. Prior to coming to Michigan, Dr. Fries completed his doctorate in Operations Research at Cornell University and taught at Cornell, Columbia, Yale, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He is a principal author of the Resource Utilization Groups (RUG-III) system for classifying nursing home residents, used nationwide in the United States (US) for payment to nursing homes and now is the Analytic Director of the CMS STRIVE project to revise and update the RUG-III system. As well, he co-authored the National Nursing Home Resident Assessment Instrument (RAI). With international interest in assessment systems, he founded and is President of interRAI, a 29-nation consortium of 49 researchers interested in assessment and cross-national comparisons of care of elderly and disabled individuals. He is an author of interRAI assessment systems for community-based elders, acute and long-term mental institutions, and palliative care.
Dr. Fries also leads projects with individual US states to improve access to care and understand their long-term care institutional and home-care populations and a new study to determine the prevalence of psychiatric illness in Michigan prisons. He is the author of four books and over a hundred articles on long-term care and quantitative modeling of health care systems.
Pálmi is Chief of Geriatrics at Landspitali University Hospital , Reykjavik , Iceland and an Associate Professor of Geriatrics at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Iceland . A Board Certified Internist and a geriatrician from the US and a graduate of from the Harvard Fellowship in Geriatric Medicine, he has lived and worked in his native country, Iceland , from 1989. He sits on the Board of InterRAI as a secretary and is on the Board of Middle Eastern Academy on Aging. He is on the executive committee of the AGES study, a large epidemiological study on aging, a collaborative project between the Icelandic Heart Association and National Institute of Aging.
Pálmi has introduced InterRAI tools to Iceland and there is now work being done with the NH, HC, PAC and MH instruments. He has led Nordic Research on the use of the InterRAI AC instrument. He has also introduced a framework for decision making at end of life and nursing home pre-admission assessment.
Harriet Finne-Soveri,
M.D., Ph.D.
Harriet Finne-Soveri graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1980. She became board-certified in geriatric medicine in 1994. She has been involved in research in the geriatric field since 1982 and in 1995 began research with the interRAI instruments (Minimum Data Set, MDS). She defended her thesis concerning pain among older residents in institutions (2001) became Ph.D in 2003 and adjunct professor in geriatric medicine in 2009.. Her research areas cover clinical fields such as nutrition, pain, and appropriate use of different medications. They also cover areas in elderly care services such as quality and work-load of care, payment systems and different fields of leadership and management. She was elected as "the woman of the year" by the BPW-Finland in 2001 and as "the geriatrician of the year" in 2006, by the Association of Geriatricians, in Finland.
At present, Harriet Finne-Soveri is the chief of the Ageing and Services Unit in the National Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) and senior medical officer in the Helsinki Social Department , Elderly Care Services.
She has been teaching medical students in geriatric medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland, since 1993. Her other appointments include, interRAI Fellow (1997), where chair of the Strategic Planning Committee since 2001. Member of European Academy for Medicine in Ageing (EAMA) she became in 1998.In addition to scientific publication she has been writing more than 400 columns in different magazines and has been writing a regular column in Finnish Medical Journal 2003-2008.
