Keynote and General Session Speakers
Sunday, 3:00pm - 5:00pm Washington State Convention Center
Joanne Handy
Chairman, NAHC’s
Annual Meeting Committee
 Joanne Handy is internationally known as one of the brightest stars in the field of home care and hospice. She is one of the nation’s top experts in the field on health care and aging. She is president and CEO of the Visiting Nurses Association of Boston, one of the nation’s largest and most progressive home care and hospice organizations. She previously served as president and CEO at the Goldman Institute on Aging in San Francisco, as assistant director for Hospital Administration at the University of California, and before that, as the associate executive director of the Visiting Nurses and Hospice of San Francisco.
In a career that spans more than three decades, she has won numerous awards and honors including a 2002 Leadership Award from the American Society on Aging, where she served as Chairman, the Outstanding Alumni Award from Rutgers University, and the Kellogg Foundation International Leadership Fellowship. She has served on the board of directors for the National Association for Home Care for eight years of its 24 year history and as chairman of the Voluntary Home Care Association of America. Ms. Handy has authored numerous articles which can be found in such journals as Caring Magazine, The Journal of Gerontological Social Work, and Nursing Forum. She has contributed chapters on reimbursement, quality and marketing to several home care and hospice textbooks.
Because of her expertise, intellect, experience and leadership abilities, she was appointed by Chairman Ruth Constant in January 2005 to chair the committee that is responsible for planning the 2005 NAHC Annual Meeting. She will welcome attendees to Seattle at the Opening General Session on Sunday.
Legislative and Regulatory Update
NAHC’s resident policy and regulatory experts will provide a comprehensive, upto-
the-minute briefing on policy issues impacting your operations today and in the
future.
- Val J. Halamandaris, President
- Theresa Forster, Vice President for Policy
- William Dombi, Vice President for Law
- Mary St. Pierre, Vice President for Regulatory Affairs
- Janet Neigh, Vice President for Hospice
- Jeff Kincheloe, Director for Government Affairs, U.S. Senate
- Yvonne Santa Anna, Director for Government Affairs, U.S. House
Senator
Maria Cantwell
 Senator Maria Cantwell was sworn in
on January 3, 2001 representing the State
of Washington, which became with
Maine, the only state with two women
Senators.
Senator Cantwell has been a standout
in the Senate, distinguishing herself even
among the giants in her Congressional delegation.
She has set her goal to be a great
Senator in the mold of Washington’s
Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren
Magnuson.
Her primary concerns include protecting
the environment, providing better
health care, building the economy,
improving education, protecting consumers
and promoting the use of technology.
Throughout, she has been an advocate
for economic, political and social justice
for all citizens.
Maria was raised in a modest working
class Irish neighborhood by loving parents
who taught her that there was nothing
more important than public service. She
worked her way through school, becoming
the first in her family to earn a college
degree.
After starting an independent business
in Seattle, Maria led a successful effort to
build a new library in Mountlake Terrace.
Due to her success building a coalition, she
was encouraged to run for state office. At
the age of 28, she was elected to the state
legislature.
Maria rapidly established a reputation
as someone who could bring people
together and make things happen. She was
the architect of the state’s Growth
Management Act, which she shepherded
through a marathon 65-day session. This
and other accomplishments, such as her
work on behalf of the state family and
medical leave law, earned her a high
degree of respect among her peers of both
parties.
In 1992, she ran for Congress and was
elected a U.S. Representative for
Washington’s First District, north of
Seattle. As a member of Congress, Maria
supported landmark legislation such as the
Family and Medical Leave Act and the
1993 deficit reduction plan.
Representing many of the world’s
most influential software and technology
firms, she learned the issues and stood up
for this vital sector of our economy. She is
well-regarded in internet circles for fighting
against archaic export restriction on
software encryption products.
Maria left Congress in 1995 and
joined a software start-up in Seattle. As
senior vice president of consumer products
at RealNetworks, she helped create
1,000 jobs in Washington state. In 2000,
she decided to run for the U.S. Senate
and won handily. During her years in the
Senate, Senator Cantwell has won praise
for her work to create a national energy
policy. She has fought market manipulation
tactics by oil companies, such as
Enron, which were said to cost consumers
and businesses alike billions of
dollars. She has fought identity theft, the
nation’s fastest growing crime seeking to
empower law enforcement and victims
to respond to this growing problem. She
has also fought hard to protect Medicare
and Social Security and has been a
steadfast supporter of a woman’s right to
choose.
Congressman
Jim McDermott
NAHC Legislator of the Year
 Congressman Jim McDermott, by any
measurement, is one of the brightest stars
in the U.S. Congress. He is well known
for being a man of great integrity whose
actions are consistent with his values. Jim
McDermott fights fiercely for the citizens
of Washington State. He makes it a point
to listen to them and to represent them in
the best possible way. He is similarly
mindful of his responsibility to all
Americans.
One measure of the respect he enjoys
from his colleagues was his appointment to
the coveted House Ways and Means
Committee which has jurisdiction over
Social Security, Medicare and all tax and
trade legislation. He is a senior Democrat
on the panel serving as the ranking member
of the Subcommittee on Human Resources.
In addition, he was the founder
and co-chair for the Congressional Task
Force on International HIV/AIDs, the
Congressional Africa Trade and
Investment Caucus and the Congressional
Kidney Caucus.
Congressman McDermott was born in
Illinois, and graduated from Wheaton
College and the University of Illinois
Medical School in Chicago in 1963. He
did he residency in Adult Psychiatry at the
University of Illinois Hospitals and in
Child Psychiatry at the University of
Washington system in Seattle. He enlisted
in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps serving as
a Lt. Commander and Chief Psychiatrist at
the Long Beach Naval Station in
California from 1966-1968. There he tried
to assist returning Vietnam War veterans to
adjust to civilian life with a public increasingly
hostile to war.
Upon completing his military service,
he returned to the Seattle area. He decided
to run for public office to change the policies
which led to that war. He was elected to the
Washington State House of Representative
and served until 1974 when he was elected
to the Washington State Senate, a position
to which he was elected three times. After an
unsuccessful run for Governor in 1980,
McDermott dropped out of politics for a
while and resumed his practice. For a time he
became a Regional Medical Officer with the
U.S. Foreign Service. Based in Zaire, he provided
psychiatric services to personnel serving
in AID, the Peace Corps and the Foreign
Service in sub-Saharan Africa.
McDermott was elected to Congress
in 1988 and is currently serving his 9th
term. Trained as a physician, he is especially
interested in health care issues. He
believes that all Americans are entitled to
health care and is the co-author of legislation
to establish a single payer health
care system in the United States. While
supporting our troops and returning veterans,
he has been an outspoken critic of
the decision to go to war in Iraq. He is
urging America to repair the damaged
relations with our allies. He has worked
hard to safeguard Social Security and
Medicare, to protect the environment, to
preserve civil liberties and to develop
renewable energy resources. He has been
a strong advocate of home care and hospice
since his days in the Washington
Legislature.
Tom Peters
Opening General Session Keynote Speaker
 Tom Peters has said we live in an unparalleled time for imagination and bold action, an era of unforeseen opportunities and unprecedented risk. He also believes that America will reinvent the way it does health care because the baby boomers will insist on it. He does not think that the eighty million members of this demanding generation will just go quietly into the night. And by all accounts, he is supremely qualified to tell us how to transform health care to provide the best for these baby boomers and their families.
The Los Angeles Times has described Tom as "the father of the post-modern corporation." Fortune has called him the top guru of management, and The Economist has tagged him the "Ÿber-guru." Meanwhile, Business Week's take on his "unconventional views" is to label him "business' best friend and worst nightmare."
Bloomsbury Press suggests that Tom has done more than anyone else to shift the debate on management from the confines of boardrooms, academia and consultancies to a broader, worldwide audience where it has become a staple diet of media and managers alike. Tom is a multifaceted dynamo-at once consultant, writer, seminar lecturer and performer-whose energy, style, influence and ideas have shaped new management thinking.
In 1982, Tom and Bob Waterman coauthored In Search of Excellence, which NPR called one of the "Top Three Business Books of the Century" and Britain's Bloomsbury Publishing judged the "greatest business book of all time." Tom followed Search with a string of bestsellers that culminated in 2003 with his international blockbuster-Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. This revolutionary book aims to do no less than reinvent the business book through vibrant, energetic presentation of critical ideas.
In an in-depth analytic study released by Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change in 2002, Tom scored second among the top 50 "Business Intellectuals," just behind Michael Porter and ahead of Peter Drucker. Leadership guru Warren Bennis, who knows both Tom and Drucker personally, once told a reporter, "If Peter Drucker invented modern management, Tom Peters vivified it."
Passion is the force that drives Tom, and it impels him into an eclectic range of areas. Tom's latest passions are women as leaders, the supreme role of design in product and service differentiation, the creation of customer experiences that rival the splendor of a Cirque du Soleil performance, and re-imagining education for a creative age. Most important for NAHC members, he has a vision of how to reorient health care from "fix-it-after-the-fact" to wellness prevention.
Tom contends that the consumer revolution will combine with technological progress to set off a seismic shift in the health care industry. He also knows health care must not repeat what it has done in the past since this simply amounts to paving cow paths. He has urged health care to stop defining itself as a "savior of the sick" and recast itself as a "partner for good health." Tom maintains that we must revolutionize the way we think about health care. In his Opening Keynote Session, he will share some of his thoughts about how this can be done and the role that home care and hospice can play in the process.
Speaker Schedule
|
