Don’t Sweat Menopause: How to Improve Care for Women

Omisade Burney-Scott

Omisade Burney-Scott is a Black southern 7th generation native North Carolinian feminist, social justice advocate and storyteller. Omisade has spent the better part of the past 25 years of her life focused on the liberation of marginalized people, beginning with her own community through advocacy work, philanthropy, community organizing and culture work. She is a founding tribe member of SpiritHouse and previously served as a board member of The Beautiful Project, Village of Wisdom, Working Films and stone circles. She currently serves on the Wisdom Circle of the Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom. Omisade is the creator/curator of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project engaged in culture and narrative shift work through the centering and curation of stories from Black women, women identified and gender expansive people.  This project is a direct result of Omisade finding herself and her peers living at the intersection of social justice movement work, creative healer identities and aging. Omisade is a native of New Bern, North Carolina and a 1989 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. She is the proud mom of two sons, Che and Taj and resides in Durham, North Carolina.

Pauline M. Maki, PhD

Dr. Pauline M. Maki leads a program of NIH-funded research on women, cognition, mood, and dementia, with a particular focus on the menopause. She uses multiple methods including clinical trials of hormonal and non-hormonal treatments for menopausal symptoms, cohort studies of the natural history of cognition and brain function across the menopausal transition, and neuroimaging studies. She also serves as Senior Director of Research at the UIC Center for Research on Women and Gender.

Dr. Maki is Past President of the North American Menopause Society (NAMS),Current Trustee of the International Menopause Society, Chair of the Society for Women’s Health Research Interdisciplinary Network on Alzheimer’s Disease, and Immediate Past Head of the Neurocognitive Working Group of the Women’s Interagency HIV Study.

Lisa Satterfield, MS, MPH

Lisa Satterfield provides advocacy strategy for physician payment and coverage for women’s health, including outreach to the US Department of Health & Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, commercial payers, and other governmental and non-governmental agencies.

Ms. Satterfield oversees the Health Economics and Practice Management team, which includes health policy analysis, medical billing and code development and education, representation at the American Medical Association CPT Editorial Panel and RVS Update Committee, and staff oversight of ACOG’s Committee on Health Economics and Coding. She also works closely with the ACOG Government Relations team and provides payment expertise to members of Congress. Her team successfully overturned payment reductions for obstetric services proposed by CMS in the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule and attained bipartisan passage of H.R. 4996, Helping Medicaid Offer Maternity Services Act of 2020 in the US House of Representatives.