Steve Ferrara MD, FSIR, FACR CAPT(Ret.), MC, USN

Captain (Ret.) Stephen Ferrara is an actively practicing Interventional Radiologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Prior to retiring from the Navy in 2016, Steve served the nation for nearly 25 years as a physician and Naval officer. During numerous deployments with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, he served in austere locations from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan and from tsunami-ravaged Indonesia to the South China Sea. In addition to maintaining a robust clinical practice as the Chief of Pediatric Interventional Radiology at Walter Reed and a Professor of Radiology at America’s Medical School -- the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Steve remains active in healthcare organization leadership, policy, and economics. Dr. Ferrara’s experience is both broad and unique, solving some of the most complex healthcare problems imaginable. After retiring from the Navy as a Captain, Steve was elevated to the rank of Senior Intelligence Service Officer at the CIA where he served as the Agency’s Chief Medical Officer. A senior leader in the Defense Health Agency, Steve is the former Deputy Chief for Clinical Operations of the National Capital Region Market. The NCR is the military’s largest and most complex Market caring for ~500,000 beneficiaries and managing a budget in excess of $1.7B. Before leaving active military service, Steve served as the Navy’s Chief Medical Officer and Director of Clinical Operations. There he led a complex global healthcare delivery system of 63,000 Navy medical department personnel caring for ~9.5 million active duty, dependents, and retirees around the world with an annual budget of nearly $50B. In this role, he chaired numerous initiatives directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and the President. Prior to his role as the Navy’s Chief Medical Officer, Captain Ferrara spent a year on Capitol Hill as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/National Academy of Medicine Congressional Health Policy Fellow. He was an integral staff member to the Health team of the Committee on Energy and Commerce (Majority) where his portfolio included FDA, public health matters, and health reform although most of his expertise was devoted to formulating an overhaul policy to the flawed SGR physician payment formula. These efforts directly culminated in the replacement legislation recently passed in the 114 th Congress (H.R.2: The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015). In 2009, he served as a volunteer General Medical Officer in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he introduced life-saving endovascular surgical techniques to the battlefield. This led to a paradigm shift in combat casualty care that saved innumerable lives and limbs in the recent conflicts and will continue to do so in future wars. Captain Ferrara also identified a design defect in armored vehicles causing frequent paralyzing spine injuries. From the battlefield, he designed a blast-mitigating seat (the MRAP X-Box) to reduce the incidence of these devastating injuries and gave the design to the DoD where it garnered $5 million in immediate funding and was fast-tracked for field implementation. An accomplished leader and educator, Ferrara was Chief of Interventional Radiology and residency program director at Naval Medical Center San Diego. He holds several academic appointments, lectures, and writes extensively on health policy and economics, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and combat casualty care. He is a renowned speaker with over 100 national and international lectures at meetings and institutions including Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, and DARPA. Dr. Ferrara earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology at UCLA and completed his medical training in the Navy, UCSD, and Harvard. Captain Ferrara has numerous worldwide deployments, clinical and academic awards, and military and civilian awards including the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal, and the Humanitarian Service Medal in addition to numerous campaign awards.