April 16th is National Healthcare Decisions Day. In this second of a two part series of interviews, we talk with Commission on Law and Aging Commissioners Eric Drogin, Jacobo Mintzer, Kyle Page and Robyn Shapiro on the topic of the importance of advance health care planning. View our interviewees bios on our web pages here. Please share this very important topic with your families and colleagues. Thank you for listening!
Healthcare Decision Making Resources
ABA Commission on Law and Aging
National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization
American Bar Association Senior Lawyers Division: Center for Excellence in Elder Law and Dementia
Veterans Health Administration Advance Care Planning
Participant Bios
ROBYN S. SHAPIRO, CHAIR is currently the Health Law Sections delegate to the House of Delegates and a special advisor to the Health Law and Ethics Committee of the Section on CRSJ. She is the founder of Health Sciences Law Group in Milwaukee, WI. Robyn provides legal counsel on matters relating to health care compliance, research compliance, corporate compliance, bioethics, medical staff matters, health information privacy, and corporate and commercial issues faced by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers and health care providers. She will bring to the Commission both ABA leadership skills and broad experience in health sciences which intimately impacts older Americans every day. She has expressed her enthusiastic willingness to be appointed as chair. She knows the Commission's work from a prior appointment as a member 2013 -2016.
Within the ABA, Robyn has also chaired the Coordinating Group on Bioethics and the Law (1996-1998), chair of the Section of Individual Rights & Responsibilities (2007-2008), and a Delegate to the House of Delegates (2015-present). She was also a board member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (1997-2000) and an ABA Advisor to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws Committee on Misuse of Genetic Information (2002-2010). Robyn is also a frequent presenter at national conferences and seminars on health care and research compliance issues, and she has authored more than 60 articles and book chapters on these and other topics, including ethics in research, genome sequencing, Alzheimer’s disease, and related bioethics topics. The Commission will benefit immeasurably from her appointment as chair.
ERIC DROGIN J.D., Ph.D., ABPP is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Psychology, and a Diplomate and former President of the American Board of Forensic Psychology. He currently holds faculty appointments with Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Mass General Brigham (MGB) Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Harvard Medical School Psychiatry Residency Training Program, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) Harvard Psychiatry Residency Training Program. Dr. Drogin is the Affiliated Lead of Psycholegal Studies for the Psychiatry, Law, and Society Program (at BWH). Additional positions have included Chair of the APA’s Committee on Professional Practice and Standards, Chair of the APA’s Committee on Legal Issues, and Chair of the APA’s Joint Task Force with the American Bar Association (ABA).
Dr. Drogin is a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a Commissioner of the ABA Commission on Law and Aging, and the Chair of the ABA Senior Lawyers Division’s Center for Excellence in Elder Law and Dementia. He serves as an Instructor for the Harvard Law School Trial Advocacy Workshop and as an Adjunct Professor of Law and Mental Health for the University of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce School of Law. Additional positions have included Chair of the ABA’s Science and Technology Law Section and Commissioner of the ABA’s Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law. Currently Associate Editor of the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Dr. Drogin formerly served as Editor in Chief of the Journal of Psychiatry & Law and as Co-Editor in Chief of Psychological Injury and Law.
Jacobo Mintzer is a graduate of the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine. He completed his Psychiatry Residency at Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Medicine and his Fellowship in Geriatric Psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the founding Director of the South Carolina Institute for Brain Health. He is a Professor in the Department of Health Sciences in the College of Health Professions at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and a staff physician at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center. He is the former founding Executive Director of the Roper St. Francis Healthcare System Clinical Biotechnology Research Institute. At MUSC, he developed the Geriatric Psychiatry and Alzheimer’s Research Program in 1991, which includes inpatient, outpatient, and consultation services as well as a fellowship program.
Dr. Mintzer has been involved in clinical research on Alzheimer’s disease for the last 20 years and is author of over 200 peer-reviewed research articles. He is the former President of the International Psychogeriatric Association, founding board member of the AARP supported Global Council on Brain Health, board member of the South Carolina Alzheimer’s Association, and former member of the Alzheimer’s Association (national) Public Policy Committee. He is also the former treasurer of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. Dr. Mintzer has devoted most of his career to the understanding and the development of treatments for neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia. In recent years, Dr. Mintzer became involved in the understanding of issues related to aging and the law. He recently published information about the prevalence of dementia in the South Carolina prison system and is an active member of the American Bar Association Dementia and Criminal Justice working group.
Kyle Page is a geropsychologist at the Edward Hines, Jr. Veterans Affairs Hospital located in the Chicagoland area. Dr. Page holds board certification in geropsychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology and specializes ingeriatric mental health, with expertise in conducting decisional and executional capacity evaluations. His work in capacity assessment of older persons directly intersects with the Commission's extensive work on that subject. He also provides an important connection in our work to Veterans Affairs. In his role at VA, he provides psychotherapy and assessment to older adults in long-term care and physical rehabilitation. In addition, he supervises predoctoral interns and postdoctoral fellows and often offers continuing education to health care providers on a range of geriatric mental health topics.
Dr. Page is committed to improving the care of older adults, and in this pursuit has served as a member of interdisciplinary teams developing capacity educational material for the Veterans Health Administration and reviewing and editing the 2nd edition of the Assessment of Older Adults with Diminished Capacities: A Handbook for Lawyers. Dr. Page has published several book chapters and articles on later life mental health and is on the editorial board for the Clinical Gerontologist. Dr. Page earned his doctorate in psychology with an emphasis on aging and mental health from the University of North Texas and completed a clinical psychology fellowship with emphasis in geropsychology at the VA Boston Health Care System.