Dr. Ron Elfenbein

Dr. Ron Elfenbein is an emergency physician and a director of the Justice Restoration Foundation whose career has been defined by running toward crises rather than away from them.

He earned his medical degree from Upstate Medical University and has practiced emergency and urgent-care medicine in Maryland for more than two decades, building and running his own clinical practice. When COVID-19 arrived, he stood up one of Maryland's largest testing and monoclonal-antibody treatment networks at emergency speed, pioneering one of the state's first drive-through operations and running a clinic in partnership with federal and state government. His sites treated well over 300,000 patients, sourced protective equipment, and coordinated with government agencies, earning him citations from the Maryland governor and the state legislature and Person of the Year recognition from the state medical society. That work was logistics, staffing, procurement, and government coordination under crisis conditions as much as it was medicine.

He was later prosecuted under the federal health-care fraud statute over the evaluation-and-management codes his sites used when billing office visits associated with COVID-19 testing. In December 2023 the district court granted his motion for judgment of acquittal, finding the government had not proven his use of the codes was objectively unreasonable or false and citing genuine ambiguity in coding guidance during the emergency; the court also conditionally granted a new trial, and the matter remains pending. His case has drawn amicus support from physician organizations and is widely cited as a national reference point on the criminalization of medical-coding judgment.

As a director of the Foundation, Elfenbein brings clinical credibility and its deepest relationships across the physician and medical-society community to the work of reform.