National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: Appendix A: Statement of Task
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

B
Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff

Edward H. Shortliffe, Chair, is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the American Medical Informatics Association, the informatics professional association based in Bethesda, Maryland. He is also a professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas. Previously he was a professor of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University and a professor of basic medical sciences and professor of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. From March 2007 to May 2008, Dr. Shortliffe served as the founding dean of the Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine. Before that he had been the Rolf A. Scholdager Professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City (2000-2007) and professor of medicine and of computer science at Stanford University (1979-2000). After receiving an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1970, he moved to Stanford University, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in medical information sciences in 1975 and an M.D. in 1976. During the early 1970s, Dr. Shortliffe was the principal developer of the medical expert system known as MYCIN. After internal medicine house-staff training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford Hospital between 1976 and 1979, he joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty where he served as chief of general internal medicine and associate chair of medicine for primary care and was the director of an active research program in clinical information systems and decision support. Dr. Shortliffe is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Society for Clinical Investigation. An elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, he is also a Master of the American College of Physicians. He is the editor in chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the editorial boards for several other biomedical informatics publications. In addition, he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1976 and the Morris F. Collen Award of the American College of Medical Informatics in 2006, and he has been a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Faculty Scholar in General Internal Medicine. Dr. Shortliffe has authored more than 300 articles and books in the field of biomedical computing and artificial intelligence.


Michael L. Brodie is chief scientist of Verizon Services Operations at Verizon Communications, one of the world's leading providers of communications services. Dr. Brodie works on strategic information technology opportunities and challenges to deliver business value from emerging

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

technologies and practices in large-scale, distributed operational environments. He is concerned with the ”big picture,” including business, economic, application, and technical aspects of information ecosystems, core technologies, and integration, with an active involvement in the Semantic Web and the holistic view of Web Sciences. Dr. Brodie holds a Ph.D. in databases from the University of Toronto; has authored more than 160 books, chapters, and articles; and has presented more than 150 keynote addresses and invited lectures in more than 30 countries. He is an adjunct professor, National University of Ireland, Galway; an adjunct research fellow, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia; and the chair of advisory boards for three institutions—Semantic Technology Institutes International, Vienna, Austria; the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland; and the Semantic Technology Institute, Innsbrück, Austria. He is also a member of several advisory boards—for the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics; the School of Computer and Communication Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Web Science Champion for the Web Science Trust; and the European Union’s Information Society Technologies 5th, 6th, and 7th Framework Programmes. Dr. Brodie is a reviewer for the European Research Council and is on the editorial board of several research journals. He has served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals, the VLDB (Very Large Databases) Endowment, and the Client Advisory Board, Forrester Research, Inc.


Don E. Detmer is a professor emeritus and professor of medical education in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia, senior adviser to the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and visiting professor at the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, University College of London. He is the founder and co-chair of the Blue Ridge Academic Health Group, chair of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM’s) membership committee, chair of the board of MedBiquitous, associate editor of AMIA’s Standards Standard, and a director of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, a lifetime Associate of the National Academies, a recipient of the IOM’s Walsh McDermott Medal for lifetime contributions, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American College of Medical Informatics, American College of Surgeons, and American College of Sports Medicine (emeritus). Dr. Detmer is the immediate past president and CEO of AMIA and a past chair of the IOM Board on Health Care Services, National Library of Medicine Board of Regents, and National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics. He sat on the Strategic Plan Work Group of the Policy Advisory Committee to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He chairs the Steering Committee of the AMIA Global Partnership Program. Dr. Detmer’s M.D. degree is from the University of Kansas, and his M.A. is from Cambridge University, United Kingdom. His education and training included work at the University of Kansas, Johns Hopkins University, the National Institutes of Health, Duke University, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and Harvard Business School. He has held faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Utah, the University of Virginia, and Cambridge University. He served as vice president for health sciences at the University of Utah and the University of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

Virginia. He chaired the IOM committee that produced the computer-based patient record reports of 1991 and 1997 and was a member of the committees that produced the IOM reports To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. Dr. Detmer's research interests include national and international health information and communications policy, quality improvement, administrative medicine, vascular surgery, the education of clinician-executives, and leadership of academic health sciences centers.


John R. Dyer is currently dividing his time between health care consulting to information management companies and a family business based in Central America involved in coffee, real estate, and cemetery and investment portfolio management. He is president and a consultant at Jarrett Associates, Inc. From January 2007 to August 2009, Mr. Dyer was the deputy commissioner for operations and chief operating officer (COO) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Mr. Dyer managed the overall day-to-day operations of the agency. Mr. Dyer served as the COO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) within HHS from 2004 to 2006. He led the implementation of the Medicare Modernization Act, which provided a new Medicare prescription drug benefit to 43 million eligible Medicare beneficiaries. Mr. Dyer held executive positions with the Social Security Administration as the senior advisor to the commissioner (2000), principal deputy commissioner and chief information officer (1995-2001), and chief financial officer (1988-1994). Mr. Dyer is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of four Presidential Rank Awards and numerous other awards from both government and the private sector.


John Glaser is the CEO of Siemens Healthcare. Before joining Siemens he was the vice president and chief information officer of Partners HealthCare System, Inc. Previously, he was vice president, Information Systems at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Prior to serving at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dr. Glaser managed the Healthcare Information Systems consulting practice at Arthur D. Little, Inc. Dr. Glaser was the founding chair of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and is past president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He has been a member of the board of the American Medical Informatics Association and is the former president of the eHealth Initiative Board and a fellow of HIMSS, CHIME, and the American College of Medical Informatics. He was awarded the John Gall Award for Healthcare CIO of the Year. CHIME established a scholarship in his name, and he was elected to the Healthcare CIO Hall of Fame. Partners HealthCare has received several industry awards for its effective and innovative use of information technology. Dr. Glaser has published three books on the strategic application of information technology in health care. He holds a Ph.D. in health care information systems from the University of Minnesota.


Laura M. Haas is an IBM Fellow and has been the director of computer science at IBM Almaden Research Center since 2005; she also serves as a “catalyst” for ambitious research across IBM’s

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

worldwide research laboratories. Previously, Dr. Haas was responsible for Information Integration Solutions (IIS) architecture in IBM's Software Group after leading the IIS development team through its first 2 years. She joined the development team in 2001 as manager of DB2 UDB Query Compiler development. Before that, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at the Almaden laboratory for nearly 20 years. At IBM Research, she worked on and managed a number of exploratory projects in distributed database systems. Dr. Haas is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor (from which DB2 UDB was developed); on Garlic, a system that allowed federation of heterogeneous data sources; and on Clio, the first semiautomatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. Garlic technology, married with DB2 UDB query processing, is the basis for the IBM WebSphere Information Server's federation capabilities, while Clio capabilities are a core differentiator in IBM’s Rational Data Architect. Dr. Haas is an active member of the database community. She served as vice president of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009 and was vice chair of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) from 1989 to 1997. Dr. Haas has received several IBM Awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement and Outstanding Innovation and an IBM Corporate Award for her work on federated database technology. In 2010 she was recognized with the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, and vice chair of the board of the Computing Research Association. Dr. Haas received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.


Blaise Heltai is the principal at genus2 Technology and a general partner at NewVantage Partners, LLC. His focus is on the practical applications of technology to business transformation and product innovation. Dr. Heltai was previously an executive at the FleetBoston Financial Group, where, as the managing director for eBusiness and Corporate eCatalyst, he led the company through a fundamental transformation across all lines of business, in the United States and internationally. Dr. Heltai has also been the customer intelligence executive for Bank of America; was the CEO of fileTRUST, which produced secure online document storage and sharing service; and has held multiple positions at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Consumer Products. There he started by using behavioral methods to predict the future demand for telecommunications offerings and ended up leading the development and marketing of 1990s’ versions of smartphones, intelligent devices, interactive television, and online services. Dr. Heltai has won numerous awards, including Internet Week’s Top 100 of 2001, MassEcomm Top 10 Executives, Microsoft Innovation Award, and Best in Show at the Consumer Electronics Show. He has served on the board of directors of MECA Software, Integrion, and several nonprofit organizations. He has been on the advisory boards of S1 Corporation, PostX, and FTVentures and is past president of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX). He has served on the National Research Council’s Committee on the Social Security Administration's E-Government Strategy and Planning for the Future and currently serves on the Social Security Administration’s Future Systems Technology Advisory Panel, and on the Advisory Committee for the University of Massachusetts College of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

Mathematics and Natural Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Stony Brook University in 1984.


George Hripcsak is the Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor and chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, director of Medical Informatics Services for New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and senior informatics adviser at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Dr. Hripcsak is a board-certified internist with degrees in chemistry, medicine, and biostatistics. He led the effort to create the Arden Syntax, a language for representing health knowledge that has become a national standard. Dr. Hripcsak’s current research focus is on the clinical information stored in electronic health records. Using data-mining techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing, he is developing the methods necessary to support clinical research and patient safety initiatives. As the director of Medical Informatics Services, he oversees a 7,000-user, 2.5-million-patient clinical information system and data repository. He is currently the co-chair of the Meaningful Use Workgroup of the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS’s) Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology; it defines the criteria by which health care providers collect incentives for using electronic health records. Dr. Hripcsak was elected a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1995 and served on the board of directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). As chair of the AMIA Standards Committee, he coordinated the medical-informatics community response to HHS for the health-informatics standards rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Dr. Hripcsak chaired the National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee, and he is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published more than 200 papers.


Yeona Jang is a professor of practice at the Desautels Faculty of Management Information Systems of McGill University. Prior to joining McGill University in 2008, she worked as a senior executive and decision maker in companies in industries as widely varying as telecommunications, financial services, utility, and high-tech and information technology (IT) services. She led various transformational programs and initiatives in IT strategy, IT-enabled business innovation, the strategic use of 6 sigma for business transformation, knowledge management and e-learning, enterprise architecture, software product development, large-scale systems integration, IT productivity transformation, IT governance, and IT outsourcing management. Her current research focus is on advancing the understanding of IT-to-value pathways to help organizations shape the future and drive changes for greater efficiency and innovation in the 21st-century economy: Not “What worked in the past and how do we repeat it?” but “What’s necessary for the future and how do we create it?”


Ralph W. Muller is the CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS), a $3.3 billion enterprise that includes three owned and two joint-venture hospitals, a faculty practice plan, a primary-care provider network, multispecialty satellite facilities, home care, hospice care, and long-term care. His 28-year career in health care administration has set the stage for his extensive knowledge of the multiple and complex challenges faced by today's urban-based

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

academic health systems. Prior to joining UPHS, he was, from 1985 to 2001, the president and CEO of the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health System. In 2001 and 2002, he was a visiting fellow at the Kings Fund in London, United Kingdom. In 1985 and 1986, Mr. Muller also served as the deputy dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Previously, he had been the budget director at the university. Before joining the University of Chicago, Mr. Muller held senior positions with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His career with the Commonwealth included serving as deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare, where he was the operating officer responsible for the state’s major welfare programs, including Medicaid. Since the 1990s, Mr. Muller's voice has been at the forefront of the national dialogue and debate on such important health policy issues as the social role of teaching hospitals and medical schools, federal and state payments for patient care and care of the uninsured, and the creation of patient-oriented medical care systems. On the national front, Mr. Muller was a commissioner (2001-2007) of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent federal body that advises the U.S. Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program. From 1999 to 2000, Mr. Muller served as chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the umbrella advocacy organization that represents the interests of the 141 accredited medical schools in the United States and Canada and of the nation's 400 major teaching hospitals. In that role Mr. Muller partnered with the AAMC's leadership to advocate for increased research funding and improvements to medical education, as well as the development of a new coalition of health care providers to improve access to care for the underinsured. Currently, Mr. Muller is chair of the University Healthsystem Consortium, a director of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, and a commissioner of the Joint Commission. A former chair of the board of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, he is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mr. Muller received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in government from Harvard University.


Leon J. Osterweil is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, co-director of the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER), and founding co-director of the Electronic Enterprise Institute, all at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he also served as the dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics from 2001 to 2005. Previously he was a professor in and chair of the Computer Science Department at both the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was the founding director of the Irvine Research Unit in Software and the Southern California Software Process Improvement Network. Professor Osterweil’s research focuses on the definition, analysis, and iterative improvement of processes. He led the project to develop the Little-JIL process definition language. He has also collaborated with colleagues in leading research projects aimed at defining and analyzing processes in domains such as health care, elections, scientific data processing, software development, and negotiation. His work on processes for the delivery of health care services has resulted in numerous papers demonstrating the ability to identify various kinds of defects and inefficiencies. His work on processes for negotiation has led to the development of the STORM 2 system, which supports interest-based bargaining

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

approaches to negotiation. His work has been supported by a variety of sources, most principally by numerous grants from both the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Professor Osterweil was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for Lifetime Excellence in Research in 2003 and the ACM SIGSOFT Most Influential Educator Award in 2010. His Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 9) paper was awarded a prize as the most influential paper of ICSE 9, awarded as a 10-year retrospective. Professor Osterweil is a fellow of the ACM. He is a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Software Process Improvement and Practice, Automated Software Engineering, and the International Journal of Software and Informatics. Previously he was a member of the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methods, IEEE Software, and Software Process Improvement and Practice. He chaired the National Research Council committee that studied strategies for improving electronic services provision for the U.S. Social Security Administration. He has presented keynote talks at a variety of meetings, including ICSE 9, where he introduced the concept of process programming. Professor Osterweil has been the program committee chair for such conferences as ICSE 16; the Second International Symposium on Software Testing, Analysis, and Validation; the Fourth International Software Process Workshop; the Second Symposium on Software Development Environments; and both the Second and the Fifth International Conferences on the Software Process. He was also the general chair of the Sixth ACM SIGSOFT Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, and of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering. He has consulted for such organizations as IBM, Bell Laboratories, SAIC, MCC, and TRW, and for the Software Engineering Institute’s Process Program Advisory Board.


Ruth Perot is the managing director of the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT Collaborative), a public-private-community partnership established to help ensure that underserved, vulnerable communities benefit fully from health information technology initiatives and advances. She is also a co-founder and the executive director and CEO of Summit Health Institute for Research and Education, Inc. (SHIRE). Since 1997, SHIRE has served as a resource for the attainment of health parity and optimal health for all Americans, with an emphasis on communities of color and other vulnerable populations. Ms. Perot has championed the collection and reporting of racial, ethnic, and primary language data to monitor progress toward health equity for all Americans. She also has extensive experience in educating and engaging members of vulnerable populations. With respect to health information technology, her relevant assignments include appointment to the National eHealth Collaborative Membership and Communications Committee and its predecessor, AHIC Successor Inc.; appointment to the Health Information Communication and Data Exchange Taskforce of the State Alliance for E-Health, National Governors Association; and service from 2007 to 2010 as a board-appointed member of the HIMSS Public Policy Steering Committee. In 2010, she served as an advisory council member and presenter for the Brookings Institution’s conference addressing data-driven strategies for eliminating health disparities. She also reviewed the Institute of Medicine’s report Future Directions for the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports. In addition to participating as an appointed member of the CMS

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

Systems Modernization expert panel, she currently advises the Office of the National Coordinator and the Health Resources and Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, as an expert panelist addressing the impact of health information technology on underserved communities and those with health disparities. Ms. Perot is a graduate of Oberlin College and received a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Currently a fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance, she is also a recipient of the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust’s Healthcare Hero Award and Families USA’s Consumer Advocate of the Year Award.


Helen L. Smits is an independent consultant. She was the deputy administrator and chief medical officer of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA; now CMS) during President Clinton’s first term. She is a former member of the Board of Regents of the American College of Physicians and the Board of Commissioners of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, serving as its first woman chair from 1991 to 1993. She has been a member of the faculties of the Yale School of Public Health and the School of Medicine at the University of Connecticut, a visiting professor at the Wagner School in New York, and a member of the faculty of medicine at the Medical School of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. Dr. Smits was the director of the John Dempsey Hospital at the University of Connecticut for 7 years. She is the author of a number of publications, with particular emphasis on the policy issues associated with the quality of health care. Her recent work has focused chiefly on Africa; she served as a volunteer for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative in Mozambique and as a senior consultant to the Doris Duke Foundation’s African Health Initiative.


Walter Suarez is a physician and a public health and medical information systems specialist and the director of health information technology (IT) strategy for Kaiser Permanente. Before joining Kaiser, Dr. Suarez was the president and CEO of the Institute for HIPAA/HIT [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act/Health Information Technology] Education and Research. Earlier he was the CEO of the Midwest Center for HIPAA Education, and before that he was the executive director and CEO of the Minnesota Health Data Institute. He also worked for the Minnesota Department of Health in various senior policy positions. Dr. Suarez has provided project management, technical and policy consulting services, and project and program evaluation services to health care provider organizations, health plans, Medicaid and Medicare programs, public health agencies, and vendors in the areas of health information technology/health information exchange, public health data standards, health disparities, quality measurement, health information privacy and security standards, and HIPAA standards, including Transactions and Code Sets and the National Provider Identifier. More recently, Dr. Suarez was a lead consultant to national and regional projects such as the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration—HISPC (Office of the National Coordinator—Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality), Technical Assistance to Medicaid and CHIP [Children’s Health Insurance Program] agencies on health information technology and health information exchange (AHRQ), and Development of Statewide Uniform Companion Guides for HIPAA Transactions (Minnesota). Dr. Suarez was appointed in 2008 by the secretary of Health

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

and Human Services (HHS) to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), where he now co-chairs the Sub-Committee on Standards. In 2009 the secretary of HHS also appointed him to the Health Information Technology Standards Committee of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He has also served actively in several national organizations, including as a member of the board of directors of the former Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), where he co-chaired the Security, Privacy and Infrastructure Technical Committee, the Clinical Research Tiger Team, and the HITSP Education, Communications and Outreach Committee; co-chair of the Privacy and Compliance Workgroup of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology; founding president of the Public Health Data Standards Consortium; member of the executive board of the Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force; and member of the National Uniform Claims Committee.


John A. Swainson is a senior adviser at Silver Lake and an independent consultant. Formerly, he served as the CEO and director of CA Inc., a Fortune 500 enterprise software company, from early 2005 to the end of 2009. While at CA Inc., Mr. Swainson led the company through an extensive transformation of its internal processes and corporate image. During his tenure, the company successfully completed the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, raised customer satisfaction by 20 percentage points, doubled operating margins, restored cash flows to a sustainable growing level of more than $1.2 billion, and added almost $1 billion of revenue. In a period of profound economic uncertainty, the company was upgraded to investment grade by all three major debt-rating agencies, and CA’s stock was upgraded to “buy” by the majority of firms providing coverage. He hired a new management team and with them reengineered the sales, marketing, finance, tax, development, and support processes, successfully installing a single worldwide instance of SAP to support the new business processes. Having repositioned the company with a strategy for growth, he stepped down from CA at the completion of his employment agreement. Prior to working at CA, Mr. Swainson worked for IBM Corporation for more than 26 years; there he held various management positions in the United States and Canada, including, for 7 years, the role of general manager of the Web Sphere Middleware Division, a business that he founded in 1997 and that grew to more than $1 billion. He also ran the IBM worldwide software sales organization and held a number of senior engineering, marketing, and sales management positions. He has attended numerous executive education programs over the past 30 years, including the Wharton International Fellows Programs and various programs at Harvard Business School (New CEO, Building Better Boards, etc). He sits on the boards of Visa, Inc., where he is the lead director, and of Cadence Design Systems. He lives with his wife of 32 years, Linda, on a small farm in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where they raise horses and dogs, fruits, and vegetables. In addition to the farm, his hobbies include aviation (commercial/multi-instrument rated pilot), boating, and golf. Before he joined IBM, Mr. Swainson worked for the Utah Mines Division of General Electric Corporation, where he was a process metallurgist. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

Peter Szolovits is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a professor of health sciences and technology in the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and head of the Clinical Decision-Making Group within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research centers on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to problems of medical decision making and the design of information systems for health care institutions and patients. He has worked on problems of diagnosis, therapy planning, execution and monitoring for various medical conditions, computational aspects of genetic counseling, controlled sharing of health information, and privacy and confidentiality issues in medical record systems. His interests in AI include knowledge representation, qualitative reasoning, and probabilistic inference. His interests in medical computing include Web-based heterogeneous medical record systems, lifelong personal health information systems, and the design of cryptographic schemes for health identifiers. He teaches classes in AI, programming languages, medical computing, medical decision making, knowledge-based systems, and probabilistic inference. Professor Szolovits has been on the editorial board of several journals, has served as program chair and on the program committees of national conferences, and has been a founder of and consultant for several companies that apply AI to problems of commercial interest. Professor Szolovits was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He serves as a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.

Staff

Lynette I. Millett is a senior program officer and study director at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), National Research Council of the National Academies. She currently directs several CSTB projects, including a comprehensive exploration of sustaining growth in computing performance and an examination of opportunities for computing research to help meet sustainability challenges. She served as the study director for the CSTB report Social Security Administration Electronic Service Provision: A Strategic Assessment. Ms. Millett's portfolio includes significant portions of CSTB's recent work on software, identity systems, and privacy. She directed, among other projects, those that produced Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence?, an exploration of fundamental approaches to developing dependable mission-critical systems; Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities, a comprehensive assessment of biometric technology; Who Goes There? Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy, a discussion of authentication technologies and their privacy implications; and IDs—Not That Easy: Questions About Nationwide Identity Systems, a post-9/11 analysis of the challenges presented by large-scale identity systems. She has an M.Sc. in computer science from Cornell University, where her work was supported by graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Intel Corporation; and a B.A. with honors in mathematics and computer science from Colby College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×

Emily Ann Meyer is a program officer and study director at CSTB. She came to CSTB from the National Materials Advisory Board and the Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design. While at the NMAB she completed two studies on Aviation Security (Fusion of Security System Data to Improve Airport Security and Assessment of Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Technology for Detection and Identification of Concealed Explosives and Weapons), directed the roundtable on biomedical engineering materials and applications, and oversaw a workshop on nondestructive evaluation for materials state awareness, among other activities. She holds a J.D. from Hamline University School of Law and a B.A. (magna cum laude) in political science from Virginia Wesleyan College, where she also minored in German.


Eric Whitaker is a senior program assistant at CSTB. Prior to joining the CSTB, he was a realtor with Long and Foster Real Estate, Inc., in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Before that, he spent several years with the Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Virginia, as an associate in the corporate support department. He has a B.A. in communication and theater arts from Hampton University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 20
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 21
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 22
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 23
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 24
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 25
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 26
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 27
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 28
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 29
Suggested Citation:"Appendix B: Biosketches of Committee Members and Staff." National Research Council. 2010. Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13061.
×
Page 30
Preliminary Observations on Information Technology Needs and Priorities at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: An Interim Report Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $21.00 Buy Ebook | $16.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

Increasingly, the core mission of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, is expanding from one of focusing on prompt claims payment to one of becoming more broadly involved in improving health care quality and efficiency. The requirements for the information technology (IT) systems of CMS are changing as its mission changes, and the efforts to evolve its systems from those designed to support the agency's historical mission come in the midst of a push to modernize the nation's health care IT more broadly. These new challenges arise even as CMS must meet challenging day-to-day operational requirements and make frequent adjustments to its business processes, code, databases, and systems in response to changing statutory, regulatory, and policy requirements.

In light of these and other emerging challenges, CMS asked the National Research Council to conduct a study that would lay out a forward-looking vision for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, taking account of CMS's mission, business processes, and information technology requirements.

The study is being conducted in two phases. The first, resulting in the present volume, draws on a series of teleconferences, briefings, and an information-gathering workshop held in Washington, D.C., on September 27-28, 2010. The second phase, drawing on that workshop and on additional briefings, site visits, and committee deliberations, will result in a final report with recommendations, to be issued at the end of the project in 2011.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!