In addition to having chaired influential Institute of Medicine reports on end-of-life care and public health,[2] she served on the IOM's Comparative Effective Research Committee mandated by Congress to set priorities for the national CER effort (PCORI).
[3] An active scholar and lecturer, she is the author or co-author of 14 books and more than 200 journal articles on geriatric medicine, aging, bioethics and health policy.
She is also respected as a scientific leader, having served on the advisory committee to the NIH Director from 1995 to 2002 and as president of the American Federation for Aging Research.
Additionally, she completed a bioethics health policy fellowship program at the University of California, San Francisco.
[11] Cassel's leadership roles and remuneration across multiple organizational domains in healthcare—regulatory (National Quality Forum), educational (Kaiser Medical School), board certification (ABIM), and private industry (Premier, Inc.) have led to concerns about conflicts of interest.
While heading the National Quality Forum, Cassel was also paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Kaiser Foundation Health Plans and Hospitals and Premier, Inc., which both had a stake in the NQF's decisions.