Our Medical Directors
Barak Mevorak, MD
A sought after presenter in managed care circles; Dr. Barak Mevorak is also the co-founder of Advanced Medical Reviews Inc., which provides fully integrated, innovative, web-based applications and productivity enhancing capabilities that help modernize the internal operations for managed care organizations. He has over thirteen years of experience with the U.S. healthcare market, and healthcare technology, Dr. Mevorak received his Bachelor’s Degree in Physiology at UCLA in 1992. He completed post-baccalaureate training, with an emphasis in Public Health, at Harvard University and obtained his Medical Doctorate from St. George’s University. Dr. Mevorak has clinical training in Internal Medicine and completed a residency in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at UCLA. His clinical experience includes inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation services, industrial medicine, and he is a Qualified Medical Examiner. He served as Director of Pain Management and Occupational Medicine, where he directed interdisciplinary pain management and rehabilitation programs, and was responsible for development of a comprehensive industrial medicine program. Recently he has also been involved as a participant in the California Health Care Foundation Leadership program at the center for the health professions at UCSF.
Eytan Alpern, MD
Dr. Eytan Alpern graduated Summa Cum Laude from Stanford University in 1993. He went on to The University of California San Francisco to obtain his Medical Doctorate. He did his internship and residency training in Orthopedic Surgery at UCLA. Eytan Alpern was born in Anaheim, California. He moved to Israel as a child, and returned to the United States when he was in High School. Eytan’s clinical experience in Orthopedic Surgery has included training in trauma surgery, joint replacement, sports surgery, hand surgery, and spine surgery. Eytan has presented and published multiple scientific papers covering diverse areas of research including: stem cell biology, immunology, transplant surgery, and bone development and repair.
Jeffrey G. Luban, MD, MBA
Dr. Luban graduated Summa cum Laude with a degree in biological sciences from the State University of New York in 1979. He subsequently obtained his medical degree in 1983 from the University of California, San Francisco. In 1987, Dr. Luban successfully completed both his anesthesia residency and cardiovascular anesthesia fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles. He obtained his lifetime board certification from the American Board of Anesthesiology shortly thereafter. After 20 years of clinical practice, Dr. Luban returned to school and graduated with a MBA in healthcare management and policy from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, with academic honors (dean’s scholar and Beta Gamma Honor Society).
Dr. Luban has over 20 years of clinical experience in anesthesiology, pain management and critical care. During this time, he had been elected or appointed to numerous leadership positions within a variety of healthcare systems, including chairman of anesthesia departments, medical director of perioperative services and chief medical officer. He has also participated in and/or held several leadership positions in a variety of hospital-based committees such as medical executive, joint commission, quality improvement and utilization and risk management.
As the CEO of two large private anesthesia medical corporations, which employed a multidisciplinary team of MD’s and CRNA’s , Dr. Luban was responsible for acquiring and maintaining the exclusive contracts and services with various healthcare systems after participating in the extensive RFP process. Through strategic business planning, he was instrumental in helping these facilities improve their operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction scores while obtaining significant cost savings through effective process management.
Currently, Dr. Luban is Medical Director of Quality Assurance/Utilization Management at Advanced Medical Reviews.
A. Halikman, MD
Dr. Halikman graduated from Harvard University and completed medical school and internship training in Obstetrics & Gynecology in New York. She completed a year research Fellowship in Orthopedics & Rheumatology under a Grant from the New York Arthritis Foundation in which she helped to elucidate the role of Glycosaminoglycans in healing fractures and completed clinical research in Cardiology funded by the American Heart Association. She went on to do a residency in Ophthalmology before leaving NYC for the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami where she completed post-residency Fellowship training in Neuro-ophthalmology under the tutelage of world renowned Drs. Joel Glaser, Norman Schatz and J. Lawton Smith. There she identified a connection between Dominant Optic Atrophy and Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy verified by Dr. Donald Johns at Johns Hopkins University and did research on Congenital Optic Nerve Hypoplasia. She also studied and published her findings on visual field testing with Dr. Anderson et.al.through the Department of Glaucoma/ BPEI, helping to make VF testing shorter and less stressful for patients. She completed a second Fellowship in Cornea and External Diseases of the Eye & Refractive Surgery with Dr. James V. Aquavella in Rochester, N.Y. where she identified and first described patients at the V.A. with what later became known as Gulf War Syndrome.
Dr. Halikman spent ten years in private practice during which time she began teaching Western Medicine to graduate students at Yo San University in Los Angeles and learning about Eastern Medicine. She also worked with the President of the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association & Board of Governors reviewing medical malpractice cases for both prosecution and defense teams and has served as an expert witness in medical malpractice cases. She worked for several years with the California State Attorney General’s Office assisting them in building a case involving malpractice, negligence and fraud against a leading California DVM and was asked to testify as an expert on the case on behalf of the State and People of California. This led to work reviewing Quality of Care reviews, experimental/investigational cases as well as medical necessity cases for independent review organizations throughout the U.S., during which time her special interest in medical fraud and expertise in complex medical assessment and quality of care/ peer review work helped her to become one of the leading experts in this field before coming to work full time for Advanced Medical Reviews, Inc. She became the first Medical Director of Advanced Medical Reviews in January 2010, and her areas of expertise encompasses Quality of Care, fraud identification, M/N and E/I.
Dr. Halikman lives in California with her K-9 companions “Molly Brown” and “Samcon T2” and spends her free time at several animal rescue organizations working with dogs and wolves. She is also a professional fine artist with many oil on canvas works in Permanent Museum Collections throughout the U.S.
Claudia Schenke-Sen, RN, MHA, CPHQ
Claudia Schenke-Sen is a health professional with over 20 years of experience in health care. She started her career as a hospital nurse and has 7 years of clinical experience, including ICU nursing in Germany and Switzerland. After her graduate degree in hospital business management in 1998 she worked as a market research trainee at BARMER, one of the largest insurance company in Germany, and as a senior consultant for KPMG. She has project management, process improvement, and policy development experience, and has provided leadership support to a wide variety of clients and provided inputs to many German regional, and national initiatives. As a health economist she improved reimbursement for medical devices at Coloplast GmbH. From 2006 to 2008 she joined AstraZeneca as a manager for health affairs in Germany.
In 2009 she came to Southern California and received her Masters degree in Health Administration in 2010. Since then she expanded her knowledge in quality improvement with experience in healthcare performance improvement and applied Six-Sigma methodology to complex processes and systems. In 2011, she earned her RN License for California and also became a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ).
Currently she works at Advanced Medical Review (AMR) where she performs quality assurance on independent reviews in order to guarantee the highest quality review possible, ensuring that authorization requests and client inquiries are handled appropriately within established timeframes, established guidelines and protocols that are required for optimal clinical decision-making.
