Appendix A
Speaker Biographies
James W. Buehler, MD, is the director of the Public Health Surveillance & Informatics Program Office (proposed) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Buehler has more than 30 years of experience in the field of medical epidemiology, serving from 1981 to 2002 as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service at CDC, where he worked in the areas of general field epidemiology, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, and, for a brief period in 2001, anthrax. In 2002, Dr. Buehler joined the epidemiology department of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, where he held the position of research professor. In 2009, he returned to CDC to contribute to the surveillance of pandemic influenza, and in 2010, he became the founding director of CDC’s Public Health Surveillance Program Office. Dr. Buehler has devoted much of his career to the field of public health surveillance. As a member of the Emory faculty, Dr. Buehler’s research interests centered on improving public health surveillance and emergency preparedness capacities and on advancing the relatively new field of public health systems research. While at Emory, he served as a consultant to epidemiology and emergency preparedness programs at the Division of Public Health of the Georgia Department of Human Resources. In 2006-2008, he served as the public health representative on the Georgia Health Information Technology and Transparency Advisory Board, where he focused on strengthening linkages between public health and health care through advances in health information technologies. Dr. Buehler obtained his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He
completed residency training in pediatrics at the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center in Portland and in preventive medicine at CDC. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and is board-certified in pediatrics and preventive medicine.
Christopher G. Chute, MD, DrPH, received his undergraduate and medical training at Brown University, completed his internal medicine residency at Dartmouth, and completed doctoral training in epidemiology at Harvard. He is board-certified in internal medicine, and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American College of Medical Informatics. He became founding chair of biomedical informatics at Mayo in 1988, stepping down after 20 years in that role. He is now professor of medical informatics, and is principal investigator (PI) on a large portfolio of research, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)/Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) SHARP (Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects) on Secondary EHR Data Use; the ONC Beacon Community (Co-PI); the LexGrid projects; Mayo’s CTSA Informatics; Mayo’s Cancer Center Informatics, including caBIG; and several National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, including one of the eMERGE centers from the National Human Genome Research Institute. Dr. Chute serves as vice chair of the Mayo Clinic Data Governance for Health Information Technology Standards, and on Mayo’s Enterprise IT Oversight Committee. He is presently chair, ISO Health Informatics Technical Committee (ISO TC215), and chairs the World Health Organization ICD-11 Revision. He also serves on the Health Information Technology Standards Committee for the Office of the National Coordinator in HHS, and the HL7 Advisory Board. His recently held positions include chair of the biomedical computing and health informatics study section at NIH; chair of the board of the HL7/FDA/NCI/CDISC BRIDG project; member of the board of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium; American National Standards Institute Health Information Standards Technology Panel (HISTP) board member; chair of the U.S. delegation to ISO TC215 for Health Informatics; Convener of Healthcare Concept Representation WG3 within the (TC215); co-chair of the HL7 Vocabulary Committee; chair of the International Medical Informatics Association WG6 on Medical Concept Representation; American Medical Informatics Association board member, and multiple other NIH biomedical informatics study sections as chair or member.
Rich Elmore is the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC’s) leader for Query Health, an ONC-sponsored initiative to establish standards and services for distributed population queries of electronic health records. He is on a leave of absence from health care technology provider Allscripts,
where as vice president, strategic initiatives, he managed exploration and execution of acquisitions and strategic partnerships, and prior to that ran the Allscripts Provider Analytics business. He had a long career at IDX where he ran the Flowcast Hospital business and prior to that was vice president of product development for IDX Flowcast. Mr. Elmore was the communications workgroup leader for the ONC’s Direct Project. He was a charter member of the interoperability workgroup for the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. Mr. Elmore has degrees from Dartmouth College (BA) and New School University (MA, economics). He is on the board of directors for Patient Engagement Systems, a chronic disease technology company, and serves as vice chair on the board of directors for the King Street Center, serving kids in need and their families in Burlington, Vermont.
Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, is the director of the Office of Standards and Interoperability and the acting chief scientist in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). Prior to arriving at ONC, Dr. Fridsma was on the teaching staff in the department of biomedical informatics at Arizona State University and had a clinical practice at Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale. Dr. Fridsma completed his medical training at the University of Michigan in 1990, and his PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford University in 2003. In his role at ONC, Dr. Fridsma is responsible for the Nationwide Health Information Network, the Federal Health Architecture, the EHR certification programs, and other initiatives focused on promoting interoperable health information exchange. He served on the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium board of directors from 2005 to 2008, and was appointed to the Health IT Standards Committee in 2009. He resigned from the HIT Standards Committee after he joined ONC, and recently became a board member of HL7.
James Allen Heywood is the co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer, Mr. Heywood entered the field of translational research and medicine when his brother Stephen was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1998 at the age of 29. With experience in design, information technology, systems modeling, neuroscience, and industrial engineering, Mr. Heywood brings a unique perspective to drug discovery and medicine. The scientific and business innovations he developed at the ALS Therapy Development Institute (TDI) and PatientsLikeMe have been transforming the intersection of biotechnology and pharmaceutical development, personalized medicine, and patient care. Heywood is the chairman of PatientsLikeMe, where he provides the scientific vision and architecture for its patient-centered medical platform. He co-founded the company in 2005 with his youngest brother, Benjamin,
and his friend Jeff Cole. Named one of “15 companies that will change the world” by CNNMoney, PatientsLikeMe is a personalized research and peer care platform that allows patients to share in-depth information on treatments, symptoms, and outcomes. This novel open model allows clinicians, providers, and the pharmaceutical industry to better understand diseases and the patient experience. Patients improve their care and actively partner with industry to accelerate and influence the development of new treatments and biomarkers. In 1999, shortly after Stephen was diagnosed, Mr. Heywood founded the ALS TDI, the world’s first nonprofit biotechnology company, where he served as CEO until 2007. Pioneering an open research model and an industrialized therapeutic validation process, Mr. Heywood led ALS TDI to become the world’s largest and most comprehensive ALS research program. The comprehensive in vivo validation program Mr. Heywood developed was unable to replicate any of the published preclinical studies of the field that led to human trials, calling into question the standards that allowed many drugs to be tested on patients. In 2009, Mr. Heywood and a small group of thought leaders founded HealthDataRights.org, an organization that asserts a new patient’s right to access a copy of all of his or her medical data in a computable form. Mr. Heywood is a published author, frequent speaker, media pundit, and active investment advisor. He speaks at business, government, and academic conferences around the world, including TEDMED, the Milken Global Conference, Health 2.0, Gov 2.0, Personal Democracy Forum, Institute of Medicine workshops, and the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Heywood is a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee, and has testified on privacy and social policy before the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration. Mr. Heywood’s work has been profiled in the New Yorker, New York Times magazine, BusinessWeek, 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, NPR, Science, and Nature. In 2009, he was chosen for WIRED magazine’s “Smart List” and Fast Company’s “10 Most Creative People in Healthcare.” Mr. Heywood and his brother Stephen were the subjects of Pulitzer Prize—winner Jonathan Wiener’s biography His Brother’s Keeper and the Sundance Award—winning documentary So Much So Fast.
Vik Kheterpal, MD, is a principal at CareEvolution, Inc., a leading provider of secure interoperability solutions. The company markets HIEBus™, a health care interoperability platform to enable edge applications to share clinical information in a secure, reliable, and incremental manner. Offering core capabilities like a community-wide master patient index, terminology standardization, episode grouping, and advanced analytics, HIEBus powers statewide and regional exchanges, regional care coordination networks, provider-centric clinical integration initiatives, and multicenter observational
data studies. Dr. Kheterpal is very active in the interoperability and health information technology landscape and serves as technical director of the South Carolina Health Information Exchange. Previously, Dr. Kheterpal served as the global general manager and vice president for clinical information systems for GE Healthcare, where he led GE’s clinical IT initiatives. Dr. Kheterpal received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he also earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences.
Rebecca Daniels Kush, PhD, is a founder and the current president and CEO of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium. Dr. Kush has more than 25 years of experience in the area of clinical research. She has worked for the National Institutes of Health, academia, a global contract research organization, and pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Japan. Among numerous publications, Dr. Kush is lead author of the book eClinical Trials: Planning and Implementation. Dr. Kush has given invited presentations (including keynotes) and tutorials at industry conferences, the Food and Drug Administration, and other venues in the United States, Europe, and Japan for more than 20 years. She earned a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine in La Jolla, California, and has a BS in chemistry and biology from the University of New Mexico.
Marty LaVenture, PhD, MDH, is director of the Office of Health Information Technology and e-Health at the Minnesota Department of Health. Dr. LaVenture is currently leading the statewide Minnesota e-Health Initiative and directs the department’s Center for Health Informatics. Current projects include models for e-health profiles, assessment of EHR adoption, and work as lead author for the revised chapter on public health informatics in upcoming fourth edition of Shortliffe and Cimino’s Textbook of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. LaVenture has a master’s degree in epidemiology and a PhD in health informatics from the University of Minnesota. Previously, he served as the assistant state epidemiologist for Wisconsin Division of Health, and he has also worked for a national private medical software corporation. Dr. LaVenture is currently an adjunct member of the health informatics faculty at the University of Minnesota. In 2008, he was named as one of the top 100 influential health leaders in Minnesota. Nationally, Dr. LaVenture serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. He is a member of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials ehealth policy committee. Dr. LaVenture has authored or co-authored many articles and scientific publications, delivered numerous presentations to state and national audiences, and received multiple awards
for his work and accomplishments. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
Mark Leenay, MS, MD, is one of our nation’s experts on geriatrics and hospice and palliative care and is the chief medical officer and senior vice president at OptumHealth Care Solutions. As chief medical officer, he oversees all clinical programs, ranging from wellness to the most complex medical conditions. He leads the clinical performance team, which is accountable for clinical care and quality in the company’s wellness, case management, and disease management programs, as well as the clinical performance of external provider partners. Dr. Leenay’s focus is providing members the best care from experienced and knowledgeable providers, leading to shorter hospital stays and improved health. He achieves these goals by championing exceptional performance within OptumHealth’s Centers of Excellence and other clinical networks. Previously, Dr. Leenay was chief medical officer for the Medicare and retirement business for United Healthcare, with accountability for clinical programs, medical payment policy, and network relationships. Prior to joining UnitedHealth Group in 2006, Mark directed the palliative care division at the University of Minnesota, Fairview. Mark received his MD from Thomas Jefferson University and completed his residency at Overlook Hospital, an affiliate of Columbia University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from LeMoyne College and his master’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Mark is board-certified in family medicine, geriatrics, and hospice and palliative care. He is a board member of the Long Term Quality Alliance and sits on the quality and research committees of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Association. He is a former director of the board of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.
Mia A. Levy, MD, PhD, is the director of cancer clinical informatics for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and an assistant professor of biomedical informatics and medicine. Dr. Levy received her undergraduate degree in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and her medical doctorate from Rush University in 2003. She then spent 6 years at Stanford University completing postgraduate training in internal medicine and medical oncology while completing her PhD in biomedical informatics. She joined the faculty at Vanderbilt as an assistant professor in biomedical informatics and medicine in August 2009. She is a practicing medical oncologist specializing in the treatment of breast cancer. Dr. Levy’s research interests include biomedical informatics methods to support the continuum of cancer care and cancer research. Her current research projects include informatics methods for (1) image-based cancer treatment response assessment using quantitative imaging, (2) clinical decision support for treatment
prioritization of molecular subtypes of cancer, (3) protocol-based plan management, and (4) learning cancer systems.
David Madigan, PhD, is professor and chair of statistics at Columbia University in New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences and a PhD in statistics, both from Trinity College, Dublin. He has previously worked for AT&T Inc., Soliloquy Inc., the University of Washington, Rutgers University, and SkillSoft, Inc. He has more than 100 publications in areas such as Bayesian statistics, text mining, Monte Carlo methods, pharmacovigilance, and probabilistic graphical models. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He has just finished a term as editor-in-chief of Statistical Science.
Carol J. McCall, FSA, MAAA, is the chief strategy officer for GNS Healthcare, a big-data analytics company whose industrialized knowledge discovery platform extracts cause-effect relationships directly and at scale from observational data. Her personal goal is to leverage these capabilities to redesign the entire notion of “evidence” and ignite a true learning system in the health care system. Prior to joining GNS Healthcare, Ms. McCall was chief innovation officer for Tenzing Health, a subsidiary of Vanguard Health Systems, where she merged creative analytic approaches with human-centered design. Building team-based care models whose approach extended into the community, these approaches were shown to materially improve health, dramatically reduce costs, and open new opportunities in a community’s economic sustainability. At Humana, Ms. McCall led R&D efforts in the Innovation Center, where she pioneered sophisticated analytics to build a diverse portfolio of prediction, knowledge discovery, and simulation models. She also launched Humana’s innovations in personalized medicine, led Humana’s Health Services Research Center (HSRC), and helped launch Green Ribbon Health, LLC, a Florida-based company with innovations in health support services for seniors, later serving on its board of directors. In other roles at Humana, Ms. McCall served as chief information officer and as vice president, pharmacy management. Outside of Humana, she served as executive vice president of managed care business development for Allscripts Healthcare Solutions and as an actuarial consultant for Milliman, where she helped fashion novel risk-sharing arrangements and implement risk-adjustment methodologies. In policy and advisory roles, Ms. McCall served a 4-year term as member of the nation’s National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, served as an advisor to the HRP Scientific Program Board, and was a member of the HSRC’s governing board. She currently sits on the advisory board of Keas, a consumer
health company. Ms. McCall is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries.
Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM, serves as national coordinator for health information technology within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) at the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Farzad joined ONC in July 2009. Previously, he served at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as assistant commissioner for the Primary Care Information Project, where he facilitated the adoption of prevention-oriented health information technology by more than 1,500 providers in underserved communities. Dr. Mostashari also led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded NYC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics and an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality—funded project focused on quality measurement at the point of care. Prior to this, he established the Bureau of Epidemiology Services at the NYC Department of Health, charged with providing epidemiologic and statistical expertise and data for decision making to the health department. Dr. Mostashari completed his graduate training at the Harvard School of Public Health and Yale Medical School and his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and completed the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. He was one of the lead investigators in the outbreaks of West Nile Virus and anthrax in New York City, and among the first developers of real-time electronic disease surveillance systems nationwide.
J. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD, is the chief medical informatics officer for Siemens Healthcare. Prior to joining Siemens, he was the founding chief executive officer of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, director of medical informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., and a Sam Regenstrief Professor of Medical Informatics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has spent more than 25 years developing and implementing scientific and clinical systems and evaluating their value. With his colleagues from the Regenstrief Institute, he created a community-wide electronic medical record (called the Indiana Network for Patient Care) containing data from many sources, including laboratories, pharmacies, and hospitals in central Indiana. The system currently connects a majority of acute care hospitals in Indiana and includes inpatient and outpatient encounter data, laboratory results, immunization data, and other selected data for 12 million patients. In order to create a sustainable financial model, he helped create the Indiana Health Information Exchange, a not-for-profit corporation. In addition, Dr. Overhage has developed and evaluated clinical decision support, including inpatient and outpatient computerized physician order entry and the underlying knowledge bases to support them. He practiced general internal
medicine for more than 20 years, including the ambulatory, inpatient, and emergency care settings. During the past decade, Dr. Overhage has played a significant regional and national leadership role in advancing the policy, standards, financing, and implementation of health information exchange. He serves on the Health Information Technology Standards Committee as well as the board of directors of the National Quality Forum, and is engaged in a number of national health care initiatives.
Richard Platt, MD, MSc, is professor and chair of the department of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. He is principal investigator of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Mini-Sentinel program, of contracts with FDA’s Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to conduct postmarketing studies of drugs and biologics’ safety and effectiveness. He chaired the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and is a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Advisory Panel on Research and the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care. Dr. Platt was co-chair of the board of scientific counselors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Center for Infectious Diseases. Additionally, he has chaired the National Institutes of Health epidemiology study section and Disease Control 2, and the CDC Office of Health Care Partnerships steering committee. Dr. Platt is also principal investigator of a CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) HMO Research Network Center for Education and Research in Therapeutics, the AHRQ HMO Research Network DEcIDE Center, and the CDC Eastern Massachusetts Prevention Epicenter.
