2017 most powerful women in healthcare IT: Thought leaders

2017 most powerful women in healthcare IT: Thought leaders

Health Data Management is honoring 75 of the Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT. The awards are broken into three categories: thought leaders, provider/payer executives and CIOs/IT executives. What follow is the list of CIOs/IT executives. All 75 women will be honored at The Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT conference, which will be held May 17, 2017, at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. For more information on the event, click here.

Dana Alexander

Title: Executive Director

Organization: Ernst & Young (EY)

Years in HIT: 14+

Previous Positions: Vice President, Clinical Advisory Services Divurgent; Vice President, Integrated Care Delivery and Chief Nursing Officer, Caradigm; Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, GE Healthcare; Senior Consulting Executive, Cerner; CEO, Springs Center for Women Hospital; Vice President Clinical Operations and Chief Nursing Officer, Centura Health/Penrose St. Francis Health System.

Significant Achievements: Alexander is working to advance the profession and voice of nursing at board levels and other thought leader tables, influencing public policy through advocacy. She is seeking to promote progressive careers in healthcare administration to include CEO and CNO positions. Alexander is successfully leading transformative change of EHR implementations achieving widespread adoption. She is providing influence in transforming healthcare to achieve the goals of the National Quality Strategy and the drive toward Value-based care.

Impact on HIT: Alexander continually builds bridges and leverages professional connections to impact policy and improve quality outcomes and patient safety. She has been a consistent voice advocating for patient and consumer engagement.

She has worked for decades to shape and influence public policy and expand the use of HIT, including electronic health records (EHRs), telehealth and other technology innovations, and encourage the sharing of data by eliminating existing barriers. Dana is the immediate past chair of the board of directors for HIMSS North America. In that role, she is focused on interoperability and usability to support population health, analytics and value-based care.

Over her career, Dana has been an invited committee or workgroup member for both the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for HIT. She has also been a voting member of the National Quality Forum committees, which endorse measures for CMS quality reporting programs.

She opened doors with Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) initiative, and has participated in national panels on how nursing informatics leaders can partner with CNOs and other C-suite members to improve patient care delivery. Additionally, as a founding member of TIGER, she co-chaired the Leadership Collaborative to address challenges of integrating technology an informatics into practice and educational settings

Alexander most recently participated in the HIMSS Women in HIT Roundtable that created a platform for discussion on how to better empower women in health IT through recognition, resources and access. She also provides mentoring and coaching on both a formal and informal basis. She has a strong belief that we must each take individual responsibility to guide, coach and mentor. She has participated in the HIMSS eMentoring program and served in a mentor role for the Emerging Leader program with the Alliance of Nursing Informatics. She was awarded the HIMSS/ANI 2017 Nursing Informatics Leadership award.

Dixie Baker

Title: Senior Partner

Organization: Martin, Blanck & Associates

Years in HIT: 22

Previous responsibilities: CTO of health and life sciences business at SAIC; served six years of service on the HIT Standards Committee.

Current job responsibilities: Workgroup co-chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health to support worldwide sharing of clinical and genomic data, special projects for Genetic Alliance and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Initiative, advisory council member of Health Level Seven and on the Institute of Medicine’s EHR DIGITIzE Collaborative recommending standards to integrate genomic data into electronic health records.

Significant Achievements: Baker has industry recognized expertise in supporting data sharing and linking of genomic data sets in the health and life sciences without identifying individuals and use of appropriate security protections.

Impact on HIT: Promoting the role of technology to improve the lives of humans, particularly those with rare conditions, and benefit researchers and clinicians by incenting them to keep investing in technology.

In her own words: Baker calls upon women contemplating a career in health information technology is to be true to themselves. “Choose academic work and experiences relevant to what you want to do. If you aren’t sure, find a project out of your comfort zone. Be comfortable not knowing everything because you never will. So accept a life of constantly learning. If you don’t like learning, IT probably isn’t the right career field for you.”

Marion Ball

Title: Senior Advisor for Healthcare Informatics

Organization: IBM Center for Computational Health

Years in HIT: 35

Previous responsibilities: Senior Advisor, Research Industry Specialist, Healthcare Informatics, IBM Research; Senior Advisor, Healthcare Informatics, IBM; University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2011-Present, Affiliate Professor, Information Systems Department; Senior Advisor, Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute, IBM Research; Fellow, Center for Healthcare Management, IBM Research.

Significant Achievements: Ball has written and edited 27 books and more than 200 journal publications and book chapters. Among her latest published books are "Health Information Management Systems: Cases, Strategies, and Solutions "(4th Edition), published in 2015 and the second edition of "The History of Medical Informatics In the United States,” published in 2016.

She is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and serves on the National Library of Medicine’s Board of Regents. She is a founding board member of the Health on the Net (HON), and she has served on the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Board, in addition to serving as president of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

Ball has twice served on the board of the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME). In 2004, she was elected to the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Board, where she served for three years.

Impact on HIT: Ball has received numerous academic, national and international awards for her contributions to the field of health informatics. She is the recipient of such coveted awards as the Morris F. Collen Lifetime Achievement Award from ACMI/ AMIA, the Award of Excellence—a lifetime achievement award from International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), and the Distinguished Service Award from AHIMA. HIMSS named Ball as one of the 50 most influential IT professionals over the last 50 years.

Ball is currently professor emerita for Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and affiliate professor at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Kelly Barnes

Title: Leader of the U.S. Health Industries Practice

Organization: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Years in HIT: 10

Previous Positions/Background: Barnes has spent her entire career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, starting as an auditor in 1988 with two accounting degrees from the University of Arkansas. She spent her early career doing both auditing and strategic consulting for healthcare companies, and in 2004 she was named to the firm’s healthcare industry leadership team.

She is currently serving on the Advisory Board for the University of Texas at Arlington Masters Program in Health Administration, is a member of the International Women’s Forum and the Healthcare Women’s Business Association.

Significant Achievements: Under Barnes’ leadership, PwC recently announced the launch of DoubleJump Health, a "consumer health accelerator." The program has two applications so far. DoubleJump Interchange enables cloud-based sharing of patient data collected from multiple settings, including physician offices, retail clinics, telehealth, and the patient's own devices, to improve coordination of care and create a complete longitudinal record. The second offering, Bodylogical, is a scientifically developed digital model of the human body that enables simulations to predict the likely progression of chronic diseases based on today’s actions and interventions, allowing providers, payers, employers, researchers and consumers to better understand how interventions impact individual patients or patient populations.

Impact on HIT: Barnes' leadership of the PwC healthcare practice began during the lead-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, allowing her to set forth a new strategy based on the changing dynamics of the industry. "The money was going to be moving differently, and every time that happens, the game changes," she says. PwC trademarked the term "New Health Economy" and through its Health Research Institute has created a significant body of research analyzing the shifting relationships of payers, providers, patients and new entrants in healthcare as well as expanding its concentration on health IT.

“With technology, my bigger interest is moving away from the notion of big data to insightful information,” Barnes says. “How do you power technology to give us the right insights to bring quality and value? That’s what we need, and that’s what we’re doing with these innovations."

Mandi Bishop

Title: CEO, Co-Founder

Organization: Aloha Knows

Years in HIT: More than 12

Previous Positions/Background: Led Dell Healthcare and Life Science's Global Analytics Innovation and Consulting Payer practice; independent consultant to the Blue Cross system.

Significant Achievements: Bishop began her professional life as a Web developer, taking her first consulting job building state government agency Web sites during graduate school, and subsequently progressed from a developer to an information architect, and program manager.

Prior to founding Aloha, she led Dell Healthcare and Life Science's Global Analytics Innovation and Consulting Payer practice, driving solutions that touched the lives of over 100 million patients. She began her career in health data as an independent consultant to the Blue Cross system, where she participating in such ground-breaking analytics initiatives as the Blues Health Intelligence program, the development of the National Data Warehouse, and the Inter-Plan Performance platform. These initiatives spawned her initial entrepreneurial ventures into health data analytics, and continue to inform her efforts today.

Bishop is a frequent industry event speaker and innovation evangelist, delivering a keynote address at conferences like the Midwest Fall Technology Conference and the Great Lakes Connect HIE Fall Summit. She is an active industry thought leader, co-hosting the Managed Care Cast podcast series for the American Journal of Managed Care, as well as being a contributor to the American Journal of Accountable Care and the online publication Tincture. She shapes event content and coverage through participation in the design and development of Social Media Ambassador programs at HIMSS, TEDMED and AHIP national conferences, as well as being a two-time Health Datapalooza Steering Committee member.

Impact on HIT: Bishop is frequently recognized as one of the most influential voices in healthcare IT on social media, and in 2015 was named to Rock Health’s Women Role Models in Healthcare. Her influence extends to policymakers, innovators, and commercial industry leaders across many domains affects by healthcare IT: patients, healthcare providers, data brokers and analytics organizations, and health insurers.

Bishop wrote a series of articles on the Meaningful Use challenges facing integrated delivery networks, and several of the entries sparked conversation with ONC leaders that resulted in material changes to the certification processes, and later reviews of previously certified software. Testing and certification processes were revamped to minimize the opportunity for non-conforming software to slip through the cracks. As a result of her work in healthcare IT, she influenced the implementation of enhanced testing processes, documentation, and release management policies for leading EMR vendors such as Allscripts and NextGen.

Jennifer Covich Bordenick

Title: Chief Executive Officer

Organization: eHealth Initiative and its Foundation

Years in HIT: 20+

Previous Positions/Background: Prior to her current position, Bordenick headed up the strategic marketing efforts at two different technology organizations, focusing on solutions for the healthcare industry. She also spent four years at the National Committee for Quality Assurance as Director of Policy and Product Development, helping develop national quality standards for healthcare organizations. She began her career at the George Washington University, Medical Center and Health Plan working on quality management initiatives and healthcare administration.

Significant Achievements: Since 2002, Bordenick has provided leadership for the programs, education and research components of the eHealth Initiative and its Foundation. Her areas of focus have included health information exchange, regional extension centers, meaningful use, electronic prescribing, care coordination, patient and family engagement in health IT, privacy, drug safety, and the intersection of health reform and health IT.

Impact on HIT: Working closely with executives from across the spectrum of healthcare, Bordenick has helped refine the organization’s strategic focus to concentrate on interoperability; data use and access; and clinical and business motivators. She has led the development of national surveys and published groundbreaking reports on data exchange, mhealth, social media, accountable care, data and analytics, telemedicine and chronic care technology. As part of her work with the eHealth Initiative Foundation, Bordenick has led projects for the California Health Care Foundation and Commonwealth Fund.

Kate Borten

Title: President

Organization: Marblehead Group

Years in HIT: 20+

Previous responsibilities: Programmer who moved up to leading the first information security program at Massachusetts General Hospital and later CISO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and CareGroup.

Current job responsibilities: Consultant, certified information security professional and a frequent speaker.

Significant Achievements: Borten led the first information security programs at Massachusetts General and was the first CISO at Beth Israel Deaconess. She is the author of compliance tools and publications.

Impact on HIT: Borten is a HIPAA security professional with a mission to educate stakeholders.

In her own words: “Information security is a phenomenal career choice for women. They are more detail-oriented, have more patience, and are better at process management because they are more adapt to orderly organization and documentation. Women in the security business also stand out more because a lot of employers want to hire them.”

Halee S. Fischer-Wright, MD

Title: President and CEO

Organization: Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), Englewood, Colo.

Years in HIT: N/A

Previous Roles: Chief Medical Officer, St. Anthony North Health Campus, Centura Health, Westminster, Colo.; President, Rose Medical Group, Denver; Consultant, CultureSync, Los Angeles; Consultant, Drill Instruction School, U.S. Army, Fort Benning, Ga.; Vice Chair for Pediatrics, Rose Medical Center, Denver; pediatrician in multiple primary-care practice settings.

Significant Achievements: Fischer-Wright led a financial rebound at MGMA from a projected budget deficit of $3.4 million in fiscal year 2015 to a surplus of more than $2 million in fiscal year 2016, which ended June 30.

She has positioned MGMA to become a marquee tenant at the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation Center, slated to open in 2018, as part of strategy for MGMA to become a leading voice in shaping the future of digital health and HIT. The goal of the Tech Innovation Center is to foster collaboration among its tenants, including medical schools, large health systems, digital technology companies, advocacy organizations, and others. In addition, she Co-developed with the American Medical Association a new conference “Collaborate in Practice,” which provides content on how physicians and administrators can work together to succeed in an era of value-based patient care.

Impact on HIT: Through speeches, panel discussions and collaboration with other organizations, Fischer-Wright has worked to raise MGMA’s profile and voice in discussions about the role of IT in delivering safe and effective patient care, particularly at the medical practice level.

Lynne Thomas Gordon

Title: CEO

Organization: American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)

Years in HIT: 30+

Previous Positions/Background: Assistant Vice President, Hospital Operations, Rush University Medical Center and Director of Rush University Medical Center Children’s Hospital; Administrator, Houston Medical Center; COO, Children's Hospital of Michigan; Director of Operations, Shands AGH; Multiple positions (Clinic Operations, Patient Financial Services, Professional Services), Scottish Rite Children's Medical Center; Director of Health Information Management, Piedmont Hospital.

Significant Achievements: As CEO of AHIMA she oversaw AHIMA’s introduction of information governance (IG) for healthcare, including tools such as IGIQ, annual surveys and white papers on information governance adoption in healthcare, development of principles for IG, development of Competencies for IG, development of IG Adoption Model and HealthRate, a subscription service to assist with IG adoption.

Other achievements include: Development of global professional and curriculum competencies for health information, health informatics and health information communication technologies by the Global Health Workforce Council, a group of health information leaders from around the world convened by AHIMA Foundation; development of the first HIM Career Map to identify job roles and settings for health information and informatics professionals; advocating for ICD-10 implementation and assisting coders and other healthcare professionals prepare for the updated classification system; advancing patient matching initiatives through the Office of the National Coordinator; developing certifications for data analytics and informatics.

Impact on HIT: Gordon is leading the largest health information management professional association at a time of great transformation in healthcare, when the way health information is managed, analyzed and secured plays a critical role in the success of our national healthcare initiatives. She has overseen AHIMA’s efforts to drive the adoption of IG throughout the healthcare community to ensure that information is trustworthy, appropriately accessible, accurate and actionable. AHIMA has made the strategic case that IG is a business and strategic imperative for healthcare and essential to successful health IT initiatives such as electronic health record (EHR) implementation, data analytics, privacy and security and data sharing.

Gordon led AHIMA’s advocacy and leadership campaign to support the adoption of ICD-10, which was ultimately implemented on Oct. 1, 2015. This was a critical victory as the new code set will more effectively measure quality, safety and efficacy of care, reduce fraud, and tell a patient story that is more accurate and complete. In addition, she launched the Health Information Management Career Map, the first of its kind in the healthcare profession.

Rachel Hall

Title: Executive Director, U.S. Health Advisory-Performance Improvement

Organization: Ernst & Young (EY)

Years in HIT: 23

Previous responsibilities: Vice President of Product Management, Global Healthcare Exchange, Louisville, Colo.; Senior Associate of healthcare Point B, Denver; Associate-Healthcare, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Significant Achievements: Over the past few years, Hall has brought three solutions to market and trained approximately 150 individuals through methodology training, hands-experience, and by providing leadership in digital health, health supply chain, and population health management. She led major supply chain transformation efforts in health, helping provider organizations identify and save more than $200 million in savings.

She established the digital health point of view and go-to market planning, and she led the creation of the methodology and trained professionals in digital UX design, supply chain transformations, and payer care management.

Impact on HIT: To tailor solutions that meet clients’ needs, Hall must constantly adapt to the changing healthcare environment and stay on the cutting of edge of new technology. Through her commitment and passion, she has embraced the extreme complexity of her job and blazed trails in the healthcare industry.

Hall is frequently expected to solve what others can’t, and is often called upon to resolve clients’ most complex challenges that require original and inventive solutions.

Hall is leading an initiative with a large health client where teams of more than 125 millennials in four different cities to solve some of healthcare’s most challenging problems. The team must come up with solutions that utilize digital technology to solve problems associated with (1) keeping seniors in their homes longer, and (2) educating non-clinical caregivers so that they are better equipped to care for their loved-ones when such care is required. The program includes educating the millennials on user centered design concepts, mentoring them as they evolve their proposed solutions, and enabling them to present their solution prototypes to the client and EY sponsors.

Gwendolyn Lohse

Title: Deputy Director

Organization: Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH)

Years in HIT: 16

Previous positions: Manager, Healthcare Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC); Associate Manager, Johns Hopkins University.

Significant Achievements: Under her leadership, more than 140 organizations, including health plans, hospitals, health IT vendors, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and other healthcare industry leaders, have joined CAQH CORE. CORE participants collectively comprise approximately 75 percent of the commercially insured, in addition to Medicare and some state-based Medicaid beneficiaries.

CAQH CORE has awarded more than 300 certifications to date, and many more are in the formal pipeline. These certifications have helped drive what is now a growing expectation among US-based health systems and health plans that any of their data exchange trading partners must meet certain requirements.

Impact on HIT: Under the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services appointed CAQH CORE as the federally designated operating rule author after an extensive and competitive application process.

In the regulatory environment, Lohse has served as a key educational expert for those considering whether operating rules should be included in national or state-based regulations. This has led to a number of states recommending CAQH CORE to their legislatures and/or mandating CAQH CORE. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has estimated that, within 10 years of implementation of the CORE’s operating rules for eligibility and claim status transactions alone, providers will save between $7.9 billion and $9.5 billion and health plans will save between $5 billion and $5.8 billion.

Janet Marchibroda

Title: Director of Health Innovation Initiative and Executive Director of CEO Council on Health and Innovation

Organization: Bipartisan Policy Center

Years in HIT: 20+

Previous Positions/Background: Marchibroda previously served two years as the chair of BPC’s Health Information Technology (IT) Initiative. Prior to her work at BPC, she also served as the founding chief executive officer for eHealth Initiative, an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of healthcare through information and IT. While at eHI, Marchibroda served as the initial executive director of Connecting for Health, a public-private sector initiative designed to catalyze national actions to drive electronic connectivity and an interconnected, electronic health information infrastructure.

Significant Achievements: She also served as the chief operating officer of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit, independent organization devoted to evaluating and improving the quality of healthcare for Americans. Her experience includes co-founding and serving as chief operating officer for a for-profit organization focused on providing electronic information and publishing services for health plans, and serving as the interim chief operating officer for the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship.

Impact on HIT: Marchibroda also serves as board member and the initial executive director for Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care, a nonprofit, collaborative, social media effort—led primarily by doctors for doctors—to support the transformation of health care, initially through health IT. She also previously led stakeholder engagement activities for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Department of Health and Human Services. Marchibroda also served as the chief healthcare officer for IBM.

Meg Marshall

Title: Senior Director of Public Policy

Organization: Cerner Corp.

Years in HIT: 21

Other Responsibilities: Vice Chair, Government Affairs Committee, CommonWell Health Alliance; Policy Steering Committee, eHealth Initiative

Significant Achievements: Marshall works with Cerner’s clients and industry partners to leverage alliances and collaborate on priority issues to influence course or form of legislative and regulatory actions, protecting and promoting the interests of Cerner’s clients.

In addition to public policy responsibilities within Cerner, Marshall works to drive change across healthcare through her involvement and leadership on industry committees, task forces and roundtables, serving on the Executive Committee of the Electronic Health Records Association (EHRA) since July 2012, where she chaired the public policy workgroup and the privacy and security workgroup. She currently chairs the HIMSS Government Relations Roundtable, co-chairs the CommonWell Health Alliance Government Affairs Committee, and is a member of the eHealthInitiative Policy Steering Committee.

As co-chair of the Office of the National Coordinator’s Joint Health IT Committees API Task Force, Meg helps the Office of the National Coordinator’s Joint Health IT Committee API Task Force by collaborating and providing recommendations on health information infrastructure and identify privacy and security risks around open APIs in healthcare.

Impact on HIT: Marshall has been a leader in efforts to bring about important policy changes around the use of IT to enable innovation, efficiency and safety in the healthcare system to improve healthcare for consumers.

She has worked with policymakers and provided leadership through coalition building and strategic planning to advance critical policies fundamental to healthcare and technology across public and private sectors, as well as international, federal and state environments.

“Health IT is all about disruption,” she says. “Often, policy makers are trying to address a problem of yesterday,and it could be that there will be 10 advancements in the next two years that will address that. Policy work in HIT thus needs to be forward looking, which is important for helping policy makers craft laws and regulations that help, not hurt, providers in the future."

She also sees her work on APIs as having a long-term impact on healthcare, particularly as consumers become more involved in their own healthcare and seek access to their healthcare information to make intelligent care decisions.

Work on the Health IT Policy and Standards committees to identify risks that prohibit the adoption of APIs was fascinating, she says. “It helped me understand the dynamic and the concern and angst of fulfilling consumers' choice, with provider fears about giving information to a patient that he or she wouldn’t understand.”

Consumer choice will grow in importance over time, and information is key in helping them make intelligent choices, she says. “There’s been a lot of work and collaboration on this, and it really moved the ball forward on the role of the consumer from a technology standpoint,” she adds. “We talk about consumers being at the center of that. This really underscores the need for the consumer to use their smartphones to access their health information and communicate with their providers.”

Genevieve Morris

Title: Senior Director, Health IT Policy

Organization: Audacious Inquiry

Years in HIT: 13

Previous responsibilities: Director and Senior Associate, Audacious Inquiry; Manage, research and programs for health information exchange, eHealth Initiative; project coordinator, Keystone Mercy Health Plan

Current job responsibilities: As senior director of health IT policy at Audacious Inquiry, she oversees strategic policy for the team and manages its government affairs piece.

Researching and creating reports, and developing presentations for the Office of the National Coordinator to inform their decisions, which affect health IT and health information exchange regulations and policy nationwide.

Worked with the Maryland Health Care Commission to manage multiple workgroups and develop legislative reports for the Maryland General Assembly; the reports primarily are focused on ways to improve the adoption and use of health IT in Maryland.

Significant achievements: Morris “fell into” health IT; after working on the business side of the IT group for Keystone Mercy Health Plan in Pennsylvania, she transitioned to a position in the eHealth Initiative that enabled her to follow her first love, policy work. A family member who had a negative result from medical care because of problems exchanging health information emphasized the importance of health IT, she says.

The development of a patient matching report for ONC is one of her most significant accomplishments in the HIT arena, she believes. “The industry really embraced the report, and a number of recommendations are being implemented,” she says. “It was one of my first big accomplishments.”

She also highlights the interoperability roadmap and the health IT framework, both developed for ONC, as key achievements that will affect the HIT industry for years to come, while helping it cope with changes expected in new reimbursement approaches.

Impact on HIT: Policy efforts that emphasize information exchange will be particularly important, both for Morris’ ongoing efforts and for the healthcare industry as a whole.

“Standards and APIs help deal with the technical pieces, but there are a lot of other pieces that need to fall into place to get the industry closer to interoperability,” she contends. “We’re coming together on standards for information exchange, but that only highlights the other problems that we have around folks not wanting to share patient information.”

Morris is a sought-after speaker on Health IT topics. She has spoken at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT Conference, the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Virginia Chapter, and at the Health IT Connect Conference. She has also prepared and conducted well-attended webinars on health information technology topics and the new Medicare Quality Payment Program.

Geeta Nayyar, MD

Title: Chief Healthcare and Innovation Officer

Organization: Femwell Group Health

Years in HIT: 14

Previous Positions/Background: Nayyar is the former Chief Medical Information Officer at AT&T. As CMIO, she provided industry knowledge to help guide the AT&T ForHealth portfolio strategy. Prior to joining AT&T, Nayyar served as the Principal Medical Officer at Vangent. In this role, she provided subject matter expertise, thought leadership, and strategic direction as part of a senior member of Vangent’s Health Strategy and Innovation Group.

Significant Achievements: She has previously served as the Chief Medical Officer of APCO Worldwide, a public affairs and strategic communications firm, where she specialized in advising healthcare clients on health policy issues and provided a clinical perspective to clients seeking to communicate critical healthcare issues to a wide set of stakeholders including policy makers, opinion-elites, and the general public. Nayyar also holds memberships and committee appointments in several professional organizations including the American College of Rheumatology and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems.

Impact on HIT: Nayyar is recognized as a thought leader in the healthcare industry. She is quoted extensively in the media on the topic of health IT. In addition, Nayyar has been listed as one of the Top 100 twitter lists to follow regarding HIT and her blog was named a “Top 10 Health IT Blog.” She regularly addresses major industry forums and serves as a member of the advisory board of the Healthcare Information and Management System Society.

Margaret E. O’Kane

Title: President

Organization: National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)

Years in HIT: 26 years

Previous Positions/Background:
- Began her career in healthcare as a respiratory therapist
- President of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (1990-Present)
- Chairman of the Board at Healthwise, Incorporated (2014-2016)
- Is an Associate in the Department of Health Policy and Management
- Serves on the Advisory Board of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Significant Achievements: Named Health Person of the Year in 1996 by the Journal of Medicine & Health. She received a 1997 Founder’s Award from The American College of Medical Quality, recognizing NCQA’s efforts to improve managed care quality.

In 1999, elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine, a highly-regarded organization of health care providers, researchers and others that is frequently called on to help shape national health care policy. In 2000, received the Centers for Disease Control’s Champion of Prevention award, the agency’s highest honor. In 2012, she received the Gail L. Warden Leadership Excellence Award from the National Center for Healthcare Leadership. In 2009 received the Picker Institute Individual Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care

Impact on HIT: In 1990 as founder of NCQA, O’Kane put forth the mission and vision that quality of healthcare can and should be measured.

In many ways, she was the front-runner of value-based healthcare. Under O’Kane’s leadership, NCQA developed HEDIS as a means of measuring that quality, and it is widely used now to shape federal health IT incentives, including meaningful use and now measures under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System (MIPS).

The collection of health data using health IT is largely due in part, to her. She has helped move the healthcare industry toward interoperability.

Lisa Pettigrew

Title: General Manager Healthcare Americas

Organization: DXC Technology

Number of Years Working in HIT: 16

Previous Positions: CSC General Manager - Global Health; CSC National Director-Health Services Australia; Accenture Partner and Director, Asia Pacific.

Significant Achievements: Pettigrew launched CSC’s Chronic Care Management service, designed to help providers improve the quality of life for seniors with chronic conditions with a capital-free, reimbursement based payment model. Pettigrew supported the creation of CSC’s Patient Care Co-ordination Centre, which offers patient communications, clinical workflow and care analysis services in the UK. In 2016, Pettigrew launched CSC’s Healthcare Innovation Alliances to partner with smart start-ups to bring digital innovation to the healthcare sector more rapidly. Previously, Pettigrew established CSC’s healthcare business in Australia and led CSC’s global healthcare strategy.

Impact on HIT: Pettigrew has driven a wide range of innovation into healthcare systems around the world enabling the shift to value-based care. She has focused on fostering commercial health models to improve patient care and health consumer experiences and supported healthcare organizations allowing them to mitigate risks and better secure their systems.

Robecca Quammen

Title: CEO, Founder

Organization: MyConsultQ LLC, Quammen Health Care Consultants, Inc.

Years in HIT: 30+

Previous Positions: Following her early career in hospital operations, Quammen held a national executive role leading professional services for software vendor HBOC, now McKesson; was an officer with Dorenfest & Associates, a premier HIT consultancy; and held an executive IT leadership position with Adventist Health System.

Significant Achievements: Quammen recently formed MyConsultQ, leveraging her expert healthcare industry knowledge and 20 years as Founder and CEO of the national healthcare consultancy Quammen Health Care Consultants. MyConsultQ offers an on demand platform to match executives, clinicians, and technologists via a proprietary algorithm and expert skills assessment. Quammen has worked with many of the leading academic, for profit, and community hospitals in America providing expert IS professional, technical, and outsourcing services, allowing them to successfully deploy information systems for clinical and business operations.

Impact in HIT: Recently completing her doctorate researching the impact of human intuition on IS success, Quammen has helped countless physicians, clinicians and care delivery systems deploy technology, infrastructure, and electronic health systems with a high touch approach that recognizes the intersection of technology and care delivery. At HBOC, she pioneered a repeatable implementation methodology now productized by many of the leading software vendors. Through MyConsultQ, Quammen’s current focus is on the impact of a changing freelance healthcare workforce as she pioneers a gig economy on demand platform designed to match expert independent talent with opportunity. Quammen is an active mentor to women in and approaching STEM roles and an ardent supporter of children and the arts as foundational components of the human side of HIT.

Sue Schade

Title: Principal

Organization: StarBridge Advisors (currently serving as interim CIO at Stony Brook Medicine)

Years in HIT: 34

Previous Positions: Interim CIO, University Hospitals in Cleveland; CIO, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers; CIO, Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospital; senior manager, healthcare IT practice, Ernst & Young; vice president, Sweetwater Health; regional IS director, Advocate Health Care.

Significant Achievements: In a variety of settings, she has leveraged new technology in healthcare with lean principles to improve care delivery and efficiency. Advanced the use of electronic health records in her roles as CIOs of various organizations.

Impact on HIT: She is an active member of both HIMSS and CHIME, where she served on the CHIME board of directors from 2004 to 2006 and was actively engaged in the organization’s policy steering committee and in building ties with other national healthcare and healthcare IT organizations. Writes weekly blog and is a frequent speaker committed to developing next generation of HIT leaders.

Vivian Singletary

Title: Program Director

Organization: Public Health Informatics Institute

Years in HIT: 10

Previous Positions: Supply chain manager, public health analyst and director of information technology practice at The Task Force for Global Health.

Current Responsibilities: Leader of the Digital Bridge Initiative to use automated systems to improve communications between providers and public health agencies.

Significant achievements: Oversaw the supply chain to deliver more than $1 billion in antibiotic donations to fight blindness in African and Asian nations. Working with ministries of health to understand their information system needs and determine requirements for a system supporting their work.

Impact on HIT: Developing workforce informatics training programs to help public health professionals advance their public health agendas.

Carla Smith

Title: Executive Vice President, North America

Organization: Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)

Years in HIT: 25

Previous responsibilities: CEO of the Center for Healthcare Information Management (CHIM), named to the role after previously serving as its associate executive director; Director for the Michigan Modernization Service; prior to entering the health sector, Smith focused on IT-related innovations within the manufacturing and banking sectors.

Significant Achievements: Smith helped to establish HIMSS as a powerhouse voice and presence in the healthcare sector. She is a key influencer of health laws, including the meaningful use EHR adoption incentive rules, the Affordable Care Act, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) and cybersecurity provisions in the 2016 Omnibus. Smith is a valued collaborator in public-private coalitions to improve health delivery through IT.

For HIMSS, she helped build widespread respect for it as a balanced, relevant, and credible view of the impact IT may (and may not) have on health and healthcare. She started with a $1 million portfolio at HIMSS in 2001, and then took on increasing responsibilities for a broader business portfolio now valued at $50 million.

Smith has played a lead role in moving HIMSS’s Annual Conference to become the largest health-related tradeshow and conference in the US, and one of the top 25 largest trade shows of any industry in the US.

Impact on HIT: Smith serves as a health sector thought leader on the best use of IT as a tool to improve the health of all, and improve the delivery, safety, quality, cost-effectiveness and access to care. She has developed multiple initiatives that are now an intrinsic part of HIMSS—content expertise, government relations, virtual programming, digital strategy, certifications, strategic relationships, career services, and corporate/non-profit member offerings.

Smith created the idea of a re-unification between CHIM (the industry’s vendor association) with HIMSS (the industry’s provider IT professional society). She worked in partnership with the HIMSS CEO and both boards to achieve a successful merger.

Lee Ann Stember

Title: President

Organization: National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP)

Years in HIT: 36

Other responsibilities: Board of Directors, WEDI; Advisory Board Member, CoverMyMeds

Significant Achievements: Stember played an important leadership role in improving interoperability, and the healthcare experience for providers and patients and led NCPDP as it:

• Created an NCPDP Universal Claim Form, a Telecommunication Standard, SCRIPT Standard and ANSI Accreditation.

• Developed real-time point of service (POS) patient eligibility verification, claims submission and claims adjudication.

• Developed real-time clinical alerts on potential allergies and drug interactions.

• Developed electronic prescribing (e-Prescribing) and drug utilization and formulary review to reduce errors and enhance delivery of medications.

Impact on HIT: Many of the challenges NCPDP tackled under Stember’s leadership over the past 36 years bear striking similarity to those faced today: data silos and lack of interoperability, administrative inefficiencies, declining margins, increased pressure on physicians and other providers to improve patient health and safety, and streamline costs. Under Stember’s leadership, NCPDP has taken on these difficult challenges, leading the private sector to lay aside competitive and business interests and take steps to move the industry forward for the ultimate benefit of the industry as a whole and more importantly, in the best interest of patients.

In its early years, NCPDP standards produced more electronic transactions than MasterCard and Visa combined. ePrescribing was an NCPDP innovation that began in the 90s—long before electronic health records and Meaningful Use.

Sheri Stoltenberg

Title: CEO

Organization: Stoltenberg Consulting

Years in HIT: 30+

Previous Positions: Director, Ancillary Systems, Shadyside Hospital; Advisory Installation Director, Shared Medical Systems

Significant Achievements: In 1995, Stoltenberg founded Stoltenberg Consulting, a healthcare IT consulting firm. The company employs over 180 professionals, who have served major providers such as the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and the University of Pittsburg Medical Center. Addressing the IT staffing shortages across the industry, she started both the Consultant Development Program to help young graduates move into health IT and an outsourcing/help desk services line.

Impact on HIT: Stoltenberg is committed to innovation, supporting women in leadership and fostering the knowledge of HIT workers to eliminate healthcare system inefficiencies through reinvented HIT support. She was the first to establish a CHIME education foundation scholarship for CIO career development–her firm has pledged $50,000 to the program, and she sponsors and mentors Ohio Northern University senior Capstone projects on pressing industry trends.

Sasha TerMaat

Title: Director

Organization: Epic

Years in HIT: 11

Other key positions: Executive Committee Chair, Electronic Health Records Association (EHRA); Meaningful Use Workgroup Chair, Electronic Health Records Association (2011 to 2016)

Significant Achievements: Leads Epic users in government advocacy, and leads staff responsible for supporting regulatory initiatives, educating users on programs and their impact.

At EHRA, leads in engaging EHR developers and other stakeholders in accelerating health IT adoption, advancing interoperability and improving the quality and efficiency of care through technology.

As MU workgroup chair, facilitated stakeholder meetings with CMS and ONC, and testified on meaningful use challenges and successes to the meaningful use workgroup of the HIT Policy Committee.

Impact on HIT: TerMaat says it’s “an accident” that she got involved in policy initiatives. “I didn’t know much about the CMS Quality Program until I got into the meaningful use world and started digging into the ARRA legislation—that kicked it off,” she says. “One Friday afternoon, one team leader at Epic came up and asked, ‘What are you doing this weekend? I have something for you to read.’ I opened up the PDF and saw that it was the HITECH legislation. I didn’t realize I was volunteering for extra work that weekend.”

But she now relishes her exposure to policy, and she’s risen through the ranks at the EHRA, now chairing the influential executive committee. “People in the trade association are extremely collegial, and we have great collaborative relationships,” she says. “There is a wealth of volunteer knowledge that goes into the work that the trade association has taken on over the years. I was honored that they selected me to chair the executive committee.”

At EHRA, she follows in the footsteps of other women who have taken leading roles, and sees that as an important heritage she wants to maintain. “I’ve had a great opportunity in the association to see several amazing women be past chairs,” TerMaat says. “All of them have helped the association and carried a huge quantity of activity. They’ve been wonderful role models. I’ll try to lead the association to the best of my ability, and hope that other people will be inspired to take on leadership as well.”

Mariann Yeager

Title: CEO

Organization: The Sequoia Project

Years in HIT: 25

Previous Positions/Background: Nationwide Health Information Network Initiatives, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology; Certification Program Director, CCHIT; Vice President, Healthcare Practice, TruArx, Inc.; President, Emerson Strategic Group, Inc.; Vice President, Industry & Government Relations, Presideo, Inc.; Director, Payer Services, ENVOY Corporation (now Emdeon); Senior Analyst, CIGNA Healthcare.

Significant Achievements: Yeager currently leads The Sequoia Project, the non-profit home of one of the largest health data sharing networks in America, eHealth Exchange, and the leading, national-level interoperability framework for trusted exchange between and among networks, Carequality.

In 2016, Carequality and CommonWell Health Alliance announced an agreement to enable broader health information exchange

She launched and ran the first EHR certification program, the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, which laid the groundwork for EHR certification requirements under the HITECH Act.

Yeager facilitated the merging of two national insurance claims clearinghouses while working for Envoy, now Emdeon, in its merger with NEIC.

Impact on HIT: Yeager has been a leading figure in expanding both health IT interoperability capabilities and connectivity capacity nationwide. Her early work in leading the payer network operations division for the country’s largest electronic claims clearinghouse (now Change Healthcare) gave her a thorough grounding in the challenges of electronic data interchange, and she has spent her career embracing those complexities and helping to surmount them in order to improve care coordination and quality.

Under Yeager’s leadership, the Office of the National Coordinator’s Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) has evolved into the non-profit eHealth Exchange, a national health data sharing network that supports more than 109 million patients, including active duty, veterans, and their families. This network grew by 40% just last year, connecting hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies, dialysis centers, and other sites of care with four federal agencies (Centers of Medicaid and Medicare, Department of Defense, Social Security Administration, and Veterans Health Administration).

Yeager also led the successful launch of Carequality which is now interconnecting data sharing networks using a national-level, consensus-driven trusted exchange framework approach, such as called for in the 21st Century Cures Act. After two years in development, Carequality was deployed in 2016 at unprecedented speed for an industry often criticized by outsiders for not moving fast enough. In less than six months, more than 210,000 physicians across more than 600 hospitals and 17,000 clinics were enabled to share data across the technological and geographic boundaries of their existing networks. The various activities of the Sequoia Project are tackling tough issues like patient matching and improving the quality and completeness of clinical data.