Ellen-Marie Whelan, Ph.D.

Ellen-Marie Whelan, NP, PhD, FAAN 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). She leads state delivery system reform and value-based transformation activities, supporting staff and states to design, implement, and test innovative care delivery and alternative payment models, including addressing social determinants of health and equity. As a chief clinical officer she coordinates the maternal child health portfolio.

Previously, Dr. Whelan was the Associate Director of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress during the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act. She started her policy career in the U.S. Senate as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow and then served as Staff Director on the Aging subcommittee to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP).

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. Through this process she became one of the first nurse practitioners in Pennsylvania to obtain an independent Medicaid provider number and for starting the nursing center she received the Secretary’s Award for Innovations in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, presented by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala.

Dr. Whelan holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, a master’s degree and Ph.D. 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.