Ellen-Marie Whelan (CMS) Ellen-Marie Whelan is the Chief Population Health Officer at CMS for the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS) and a Senior Advisor at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) where she coordinates the pediatric portfolio across the Center. In both positions Dr. Whelan works on the design, implementation and testing of delivery system transformation and payment reform initiatives.
Before CMS, Dr. Whelan was the Associate Director of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress. Her research and publications focused the development and passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act with a focus on system delivery and payment reform, primary care, and health workforce policy. She started her policy career in the U.S. Senate as a health policy advisor, working for both Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and as Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Aging to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions with Sen. Barbara Mikulski.
Before coming to Capitol Hill Dr. Whelan was a health services researcher and faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University and practiced as nurse practitioner for over a decade. She has worked in a variety of primary care settings and started an adolescent primary care clinic in West Philadelphia. Dr. Whelan holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in nursing and health policy from the University of Pennsylvania and The Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in primary care policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.