Meet the speakers.

Stephanie Porrino is the Founder and CEO of Empower Healthcare Insights, a trusted resource for Human Resources leaders, insurance advisors, and executives who want to cut through the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system.

With a career dedicated to training, transparency, and strategic guidance, Stephanie empowers organizations to design benefits programs that are cost-efficient, compliant, and aligned with the best interests of employees.

A nationally recognized speaker and educator, Stephanie delivers engaging, results-focused presentations at conferences and corporate events across the country.

Her sessions blend real-world experience, actionable insights, and a passion for advocacy, ensuring audiences leave with strategies they can implement immediately.

Dr. Scott Conard is a practicing family physician and healthcare entrepreneur who helps benefits and HR leaders solve the problem that keeps them up at night: rising medical cost.

His approach is built on a simple conviction — the surest path to reduced cost is a better model of care that emphasizes prevention, early detection, excellent management of known conditions, and healthier behaviors.

As Medical Advisor for corporations and benefit coalitions, he has spent his career bridging medicine, data, and corporate strategy — designing the plan, then serving as the accountable partner who makes it work.

Mike's mission is to build more convenient access to care, leading to better overall care.

Better care leads to healthier employees.

Healthier employees leads to stronger organizations.

With Tauber Risk Consulting Services, Mike brings more than twenty-five years of healthcare and employee benefits expertise together with innovative, employer-focused healthcare solutions that go far beyond traditional insurance.

We partner with employers to design smarter healthcare benefit strategies through cost containment, self-funded plans, direct primary care, and transparent risk management.

Mark Galvin has a long career of anticipating market needs, innovating solutions and growing new technology companies.

He co-founded TALON to arm group health plans with the tools and teaching necessary to recapture a meaningful portion of the $850 billion overspend wasted on providers of overpriced medical tests and procedures.

Previously, Mr. Galvin founded and led four tech startups that grew at rates that ranked each into the 100 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. to include Cedar Point Communications that was #2 on the INC 500 list in 2007.

During his tenure, Mark has consulted to the White House on healthcare transparency initiatives, presented at investment conferences, entrepreneurial forums and at a wide variety of technology industry events.

His innovations have been covered in most major media outlets including Forbes, Money Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Huffington Post among many others.

Mark attended McGill University where he studied math and computer science in the undergraduate and graduate faculties from 1978 to 1983.

Mr. Galvin is one of few entrepreneurs who received training as a Lean Launch Pad Educator from Steve Blank at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.

This methodology codifies real-world, hands-on, immersive learning about what it takes to transfer knowledge successfully into companies that solve pain points for prospective customers.

Combining this with knowledge gained as a true serial entrepreneur, and leveraging extensive relationships, Mark has helped dozens of companies get started on proper footing.

Mark serves on company boards as well as the non-profit board of the Digital Marketing Center, the Advisory Boards of Great Bay Community College and the UNH Computer Science department, and the Education Committee of the NH High Tech Council.

Ericka McPherson, Esq., is Vice President of Captive Strategies at Complete Captive Management Services (CCMS) and brings more than two decades of experience across employee benefits, insurance, captive programs, law, and public policy.

Throughout her career, she has worked with employers, brokers, and industry partners to challenge the traditional approach to financing healthcare and explore strategies that create greater transparency, control, and accountability.

Her experience spans self-funded health plans, stop-loss and captive structures, benefits strategy, and executive leadership, giving her a practical perspective on both the opportunities and challenges employers face in today's healthcare market.

Ericka is particularly passionate about helping employers better understand where their healthcare dollars go and how alternative risk strategies can turn healthcare financing from an annual renewal exercise into a long-term business strategy.