Pamela R. Knecht, President and CEO of ACCORD LIMITED, has provided consulting services to a wide range of industries and organizations over her 36-year career. Her clients include for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in industries such as health care, financial services, distribution, retail, professional services, manufacturing, associations, social services, arts, and education. She has deep expertise in not-for-profit healthcare and closely-held and family-owned businesses. During the last 25 years, she has focused on assisting owners, boards and CEOs across the country with strategic planning; governance education, assessment, restructuring and development; organizational diagnosis and change management; team effectiveness; and merger / affiliation facilitation.

Pam works closely with her clients to custom-design and facilitate processes and events that enable owners, board members and senior-level executives to clarify their mission, vision and goals.  In addition, she helps them to develop their organization, their teams, and themselves to support implementation of their strategic plans and governance to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness.

Pam is a frequent speaker and facilitator at hospital and health system board retreats as well as at local, regional, and national health care conferences.  Her presentations to health systems, family business centers, associations, and other organizations address issues related to strategic planning and governance effectiveness. She is a faculty member for The Governance Institute, iProtean, and numerous state hospital associations. She served as a faculty member for the American Hospital Association’s former Center for Healthcare Governance. In 2007, she was selected by The Governance Institute as a Governance Advisor for their hospital and health system members.

Pam has authored numerous articles for AHA’s Trustee Magazine, Great Boards, ACHE’s Healthcare Executive and The Governance Institute’s BoardRoom Press. Her articles and white papers address various aspects of strategic planning and board effectiveness including structure, composition and functioning.

Prior to joining ACCORD LIMITED, Pam was a consultant for an executive education and organization development firm that served the Fortune 200.  Pam and her colleagues helped CEOs and their direct reports to understand the strategic challenges that would be facing their industry and organization over the next five to ten years.  During the previous ten years, Pam consulted within the computer and telecommunications industries where her clients included not-for-profit, for profit, privately-held and publicly traded organizations. 

Ms. Knecht is a graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is a member of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development and the American College of Healthcare Executives. 

As the principal founder of ACCORD LIMITED, Mr. Kazemek works closely with other ACCORD consultants to identify creative solutions to the issues and problems facing our clients.

Mr. Kazemek has approximately 40 years of experience in the management consulting field serving a variety of industries and types of organizations, including health care, manufacturing, distribution, financial services, not-for-profit, closely-held and Fortune 1000 companies. Before co-founding ACCORD, Mr. Kazemek was a national partner in one of the largest professional services organizations in the United States. Prior to that, Mr. Kazemek was the Chairman of a highly successful national consulting firm, which he co-founded in 1974.

Mr. Kazemek’s areas of specialization include: governance assessment, restructuring and development; strategic planning; organizational analysis and development; change management; merger/collaborative arrangements; facilitating integration and effective management in complex organizations.

More than 80 articles/monographs written by Mr. Kazemek have been published in professional and trade journals and newspapers and magazines, including the best-selling white papers published by The Governance Institute in San Diego on the board’s role in strategic direction-setting, the evolution of health systems, and addressing growing challenges to an institution’s integrity, and hospital-physician collaboration. Mr. Kazemek is a frequent speaker on a number of business and health care subjects, such as strategic planning approaches, governance effectiveness, change management, merger/collaborative ventures, and organization development issues. He was also on the faculty and one of the Governance Advisors of The Governance Institute in San Diego, California for over 15 years.

Mr. Kazemek completed his undergraduate and graduate work in the Behavioral Sciences Program at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He also completed a number of post-graduate programs in organization development and change management, including Cape Cod Institute workshops taught by Dr. Edgar Schein and Dr. Warren Bennis.

Barry S. Bader is a Senior Advisor to ACCORD LIMITED. Before joining ACCORD in 2015, Barry headed his own firm Bader & Associates, specializing in the governance of hospitals and health systems. Since 1980 Barry has facilitated board retreats and consulted on governance assessment, improvement and redesign initiatives for hospitals, health systems and other health­ related organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Barry is an advocate for governance accountability, integrity and transparency; visionary strategic thinking; streamlined board and committee structures; ongoing board education and active engagement; and a strong relationship between the governing board and CEO. 

He is the founder of the Great Boards newsletter and website, now published through the American Hospital Association. He also served on the faculty and was Governance Advisor for The Governance Institute. He has served on the Board of Trustees of Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, MD as well as the Board Quality Committee at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. 

Prior to his consulting career, Barry held positions with the Maryland Hospital Education Institute, the American Bankers Association, the National Civil Service League and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He resides in Scottsdale, Arizona and upstate New York.

Barry has served as a Senior Advisor and faculty member for the American Hospital Association's Center for Healthcare Governance and as a member of the Center's National Board of Advisors. 

Ms. Tracey Camp is a Senior Consultant with Krentz Consulting LLC, a consulting firm focused on assisting healthcare organizations with their business strategy. She has 28 years of consulting experience in strategic, service line, and medical staff development engagements. She is expert at creating competitive assessments and converting data into meaningful information to support strategic decision-making. She has demand modeling expertise in a variety of inpatient and outpatient services and has a deep understanding of pediatric healthcare.

Ms. Camp is a speaker and author on the topics of effective data presentation and competitive assessments. Ms. Camp holds a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University. She started her healthcare consulting career in 1987 at Jennings Ryan & Kolb, and continued with the practice after it was acquired by Noblis in 2004. Prior to consulting, Ms. Camp was a technical researcher at the Center for Health Services and Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Ms. Susanna E. Krentz is President and founder of Krentz Consulting LLC, a consulting firm focused on assisting healthcare organizations with their business strategy. She has over thirty years of advisory experience in strategic and service line planning, process facilitation, and medical staff strategy for a wide range of healthcare organizations.

Ms. Krentz is a frequent speaker and author on healthcare strategy and financial topics. She served as a Board member for the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development of the American Hospital Association. She received the Award for Individual Professional Excellence in 2000 from SHSMD, and The Yale Medal from Yale University in 2010.

Ms. Krentz holds her Master of Business Administration from the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University. Prior to founding Krentz Consulting LLC she was the Deputy Director for Health Innovation at Noblis, Executive Vice President of Jennings Ryan & Kolb, and a consultant with Amherst Associates.

Gary Murdock is a consultant to healthcare organizations on governing board development, corporate structure strategy, and healthcare policy. Mr. Murdock has presented and facilitated discussions on healthcare issues including medical economics of the US health system, strategic plan development, and implications of Medicare and Medicaid policy at the local, state, and international levels.

Until 2017, Mr. Murdock served as vice president of health policy and governmental affairs for WVU Medicine, the largest healthcare provider in the state. WVU Medicine includes seven hospitals and the West Virginia University academic medical center. In his 25-year career at WVU Medicine, he served as a financial analyst, directed a hospital-wide health information management office, led the program development team for both the hospital and the physician practice, and served as vice president of marketing, planning, and communications. As VP of strategic planning he guided the strategic planning processes that resulted in the development of a joint operating agreement for the hospitals and physician practices that were previously managed separately. As the West Virginia University system grew from one hospital to a system with over twenty-five corporations, Mr. Murdock’s work on hospital governance issues included:

• Planning and facilitation of board retreats to achieve strategic alignment.

• Board restructuring and bylaw review.

• Consensus building and understanding related to corporate reserve powers after mergers and acquisitions.

• Roles and integration of subcommittee functions across multiple boards.

Mr. Murdock is currently President of the Board of Directors of the West Virginia Partnership for Health Innovation, a nonprofit statewide coalition of health organizations and individuals working with state government, universities, and providers to develop strategies for improving the state's healthcare delivery network.

Prior to working for WVU Hospitals, he worked as an industrial engineer in the textile industry in North Carolina and Virginia and was a teaching fellow in the WVU School of Engineering. Murdock graduated from WVU in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering.

Bill Stamp has 25 years of experience in healthcare, with nearly 20 years working closely with executives and boards of directors. He has provided consulting services to health care and other not-for-profit clients in the areas of strategic planning, market planning, and governance effectiveness.

Bill has been working with ACCORD LIMITED for the past two years to facilitate processes associated with governance restructuring, affiliation review, and board self-assessments. He has established innovative solutions for boards to survey themselves in illuminative ways and brings a unique set of analytical skills to the review of board assessments.

In addition to his work with ACCORD LIMITED, Bill is a network executive for a northeastern health system. He possesses significant experience as a leader in strategic planning, governance development, and business analytics. He also has additional leadership experience in hospital and physician group operations and financial management for academic non-profit systems. He is an effective problem-solver skilled in working through complex strategic issues at the corporate and board levels. Bill is known as a strong communicator with the ability to translate technical, clinical, and administrative issues into meaningful information for various audiences.

As an officer on community and health organization boards, Bill brings an understanding of the triangular relationships in governance – management, board leadership, and third-parties (e.g., physicians). He is also a skilled facilitator of group decision making.

Bill holds a B.S. in Economics from Juniata College (Huntingdon, PA) and an MBA, with concentrations in Information Technology, from Binghamton (NY) University.

Over her 35-year career, Debra Stock has been a nationally recognized health care leader with extensive experience working with hospitals and health systems to improve their boards’ performance.

For more than 15 years, Debra served as Vice President of Trustee Services for the American Hospital Association. In this role Debra served as the AHA’s national expert on health care governance issues, trends and best practices. She oversaw the development of best-in-class governance resources, tools, education, products and services for boards and CEOs across the country and was a sought- after speaker at board retreats and state hospital association meetings on many governance topics. She also oversaw the AHA’s biennial national healthcare governance survey which provides the most current data on health care governance trends and practices.

Debra also served as a senior leader with the AHA’s Center for Healthcare Governance where she led the Center’s board assessment service and worked with hundreds of health care systems, academic medical centers, and rural hospitals to conduct their board assessments and develop actionable development plans to help improve board performance. 

Earlier in her career, Debra also served in other consulting, health care association, and hospital management positions.

Today, Debra is President of Debra Stock & Associates, LLC, a boutique consulting firm that helps hospitals and health systems across the country realize their potential for governance excellence through customized board assessments, board orientation, tailored board development programs, board retreats, board meeting evaluations and board leadership coaching.

Debra holds an MBA from DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland.

Luanne R. Stout is the President/CEO of Luanne R. Stout & Associates, Inc., a governance consulting firm. She has over 40 years of governance experience, including 20 years as Vice President/Chief Governance Officer/Corporate Secretary for one of the largest non-profit health care systems in the country. She has worked with non-profit and public systems, hospitals, physician organizations, joint ventures, and others to develop their governance structure and infrastructure, including after mergers and progressive governance restructuring.

Luanne also specializes in the development of advancing relationships among parent and entity boards, governance infrastructure, board processes and standards, division of authority and authority matrices, engaging board members, board portals, and the development of chief governance officers and governance teams.

Health care systems and hospitals supported by Luanne have been widely recognized for leading edge governance practices by The Joint Commission, the American Hospital Association (including its Blue Ribbon Panels on Governance), the Texas Hospital Association (including its Excellence in Governance Award), the national Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award examiners, bond credit rating agencies, and others.

Luanne has been published, quoted, and featured in respected trade journal articles and has been a featured speaker in national and state conferences across the country.

Luanne has a Master’s degree in Health Care Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington, a Bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Health Care Administration from the University of Texas at Arlington, and is a certified nurse paralegal. Although she works across the country, she is based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. 

Mary Totten specializes in governance education, consulting and communication. For more than 25 years, she has been a speaker and consultant to hospitals, health systems and other health organizations on board oversight of quality, governance restructuring, board orientation and evaluation, medical staff credentialing, and strategic planning. She has guided the work and written the final reports for four national Blue Ribbon Panels on health care governance and developed tools and other resources to implement their recommendations.

Mary was co-founder of Health Governance Digest, a national newsletter for health care boards. She was an owner and principal of the American Governance & Leadership Group, which was purchased by the American Hospital Association in 2004.

Mary conducts board retreats and education programs and has authored six books and more than 100 articles on governance and leadership issues. She has served as a trustee and board officer on school, hospital and health system boards, most recently on the board of Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox, IL, where she chaired the Risk, Audit and Legal Affairs Committee.

She also co-founded and from 2009-2014 served as President of Best On Board, a governance education company that delivers online health care board education programs, and worked with insurers and others to fund delivery of these resources in five states, two national organizations and a variety of individual hospitals and health systems. Best On Board is now owned by the Montana Health Network.

Mary has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.