Over the past 10 years, David Roberts has led HIMSS to a position of serving as a national, credible, trusted and balanced voice on health IT public policy. Prior to joining HIMSS in 2002, Roberts served as a financial analyst for the U.S. Air Force in the Pentagon and Germany, as a staff assistant to U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker, Jr. on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Handicapped, and as a senior professional staff member on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee. Roberts was elected to a four-year term as a member of the Solana Beach (Calif.) City Council in 2004, served as Mayor in 2008, and was re-elected to the Council for a second four-year term in 2008. He is also a federal appointee to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Panel on Medicare Education, and a founding member of the National Health IT Collaboration for Underserved Populations. Roberts is a member of the Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas Community Advisory Board, a member of the UCSD Healthcare Information Technology Program Advisory Board, and a member of Cal eConnect Business Advisory Group. As a result of his leadership, HIMSS's opinion and knowledge is routinely sought by legislators and regulators at both the federal and state levels.
Kent Gale has made a number of contributions to the health IT industry. As the founder and chairman of the board of KLAS, he has brought the voices of CIOs, IT executives, and users together to be aggregated, allowing vendors to hear the industry's voice and focus on the needs of their clients. Since performance is being measured, hospitals and providers can use this information as an important part of their acquisition criteria when implementing information systems. Gale is also one of the biggest advocates of CIOs, striving to help them achieve success. Through his efforts, all voices can be heard and make a difference. In addition to being a recipient of the 2006 CHIME Lifetime Achievement Award, Gale has served on the CHIME Board and the CHIME Education Foundation Board. He is currently in Portugal on an 18-month service mission with his church.
Judith Faulkner is the founder and CEO of Epic Systems Corporation. Since Epic's founding in 1979, she has built a talented group of developers into a powerhouse information technology corporation, developing cutting-edge software for the healthcare industry. Faulkner has successfully changed the way the business of health IT is done. As a result of Epic's success, the industry has built better and more comprehensive electronic medical record systems, improved the standard of service to clients, found better ways to install software on-time and at budget, and provided integration between inpatient and ambulatory solutions. Faulkner built the product that has become the standard for EMRs based on functionality, service and support. Furthermore, she brought standards of implementation to many larger organizations, a standards model they adhered to in bringing products live in a timely and cost effective manner. Once very successful in the ambulatory market, Faulkner entered the inpatient market to integrate inpatient and outpatient information and has set the industry standard. Her vision and success has lifted the market from a siloed industry to a fully integrated environment. Faulkner served on the HIMSS advisory board from 2003 to 2005, and has been involved in many national efforts focused on health IT, such as standards setting, data exchange and meaningful use.
David Garets is co-author of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model, SM which has become a de facto world standard to measure hospital progress in the adoption of electronic medical records. As managing director of Gartner, Garets also co-authored the Gartner Generations of CPRs model. Following his service on the HIMSS Board of Directors and as Board chair in 2004, he became the president of HIMSS Analytics and executive vice president of HIMSS. He assisted HIMSS in building a business that is valued by vendors for the information it provides to assist in the marketing of their products and to providers for measuring their IT adoption rate. Garets is an author and international speaker on health information technologies, strategies, governance and futures. He is a Charter member of CHIME, and has been a course director and faculty member for the CHIME information management executive courses for 11 years. Today, he is the executive director of the healthcare IT program suite at the Advisory Board Company based in Washington, D.C.
As president and CEO, Steve Lieber brings to HIMSS more than 29 years of experience and leadership in healthcare and healthcare association management. Since 2000, he has established the Society as a global leader on issues such as EHRs, interoperability, technology standards, IT adoption and certification. He has brought significant growth to HIMSS and expanded its scope to encompass ambulatory IT issues and healthcare financial information systems. Lieber has also launched conferences in Asia, the Middle East and Europe (in collaboration with the European Commission and the World Health Organization) to promote health IT knowledge. Lieber also serves on the HIMSS Board and its two related corporations, as well as other corporate, non-profit and coalition boards and groups. He is one of the founders of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology and the Health Information Technology Standards Panel, which are both U.S. federally-funded initiatives supporting the U.S. interoperability effort. As a nationally known commentator on health policy, and specifically health IT trends and issues, Lieber is a regular speaker and contributor to corporate strategic planning efforts, government-sponsored policy efforts, private sector initiatives and other nonprofit organizations. Previously, he served as CEO of the Emergency Nurses Association before joining the American Hospital Association as vice president, Division of Personal Membership Groups.
As a pioneer in the field of medical informatics, Bill Braithwaite has dedicated his career to improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare for patients and practitioners through information technology. He developed the legislative content for the Administrative Simplification Subtitle of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and subsequently, oversaw the regulations implementing that Subtitle. Dr. Braithwaite served on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), contributing to the June 2004 report titled Revolutionizing Health Care through Information Technology. While the full impact and benefits of administrative simplification under HIPAA are still a work in progress, the impact has rippled throughout the healthcare landscape. All providers, payers and health agencies are affected by this fundamental act to transform healthcare. Dr. Braithwaite has served on the HIMSS Financial Systems Steering committee, the Financial Systems Public Policy and Advocacy work group, and is currently a member of the Information Systems Security work group. He is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and of Health Level Seven (HL7). He has been an active member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), HL7, and the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and has served on each of their Boards. Currently, he is the Chief Medical Officer at Anakam, an Equifax company, in Washington, DC.
Neal Patterson has shown visionary leadership and commitment to changing the face of healthcare processes and outcomes. Patterson is chairman and CEO of Cerner Corporation, which he co-founded in 1979. Starting with a single laboratory information system, by the mid 1980s, Patterson was investing in creating a suite of fully integrated, clinically focused commercial healthcare applications. Cerner entered the 1990s with a first-of-its-kind application set built on a common platform with real-time interactive decision support. In the mid 1990s, Patterson presciently invested significant resources to rebuild the platform on client-server technology using a person-centric data model. Continuing through Cerner's third and now fourth decades, Patterson has led Cerner to invest more than $2.5 billion in R&D of healthcare IT, and the solutions he once envisioned are valued by more than 2,300 hospitals and 30,000 physicians in private practice. His public company has outperformed the broader markets since its inception, and today is listed on the S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 indexes.
As vice president of Applied Clinical Informatics for Tenet Healthcare Corporation in Dallas, Texas, Liz Johnson has positively influenced and enhanced informatics in a number of ways. She successfully advocated to make nursing informatics a permanent position at every hospital within her health system and created the Clinical Informaticist Academy to develop and provide ongoing education for informaticists. Johnson has leveraged her experience and insights as a nurse informaticist to benefit the healthcare reform movement as a member of the ONC HIT Standards Committee and co-chair of the HIT Standards Committee Implementation work group. What distinguishes Johnson is her leadership in practice and within her role in HIMSS and as an effective advocate of information technology-based healthcare reform. As a former vice chair of the HIMSS Board, she utilized her leadership and clinician perspectives to help ensure that nursing informatics theory and practice as a competency was included and carefully considered in both discussions and decisions. Johnson has successfully integrated a "patient-first" quality approach into policies and positions for healthcare reform and other initiatives to accelerate the successful adoption and implementation of clinical applications. She truly is a transformative nursing informatics executive.
Blackford Middleton, MD, served as chair of the HIMSS Board in 2006, becoming the first physician chair of the Society. This marked a clear milestone for HIMSS, representing the clinical transformation that health information management and systems was experiencing. He is also past chairman of the Computer-based Patient Record Institute (CPRI), serving early on in activities surrounding the Nicholas E. Davies Awards of Excellence. Dr. Middleton was appointed to serve on the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics in 2008. Currently, he is a member of the National Quality Forum Health IT Advisory Council and a member of the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). In addition, he participates in several other organizations and editorial boards, including serving as past treasurer of the American Telemedicine Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Middleton is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, American College of Medical Informatics and HIMSS. Dr. Middleton is currently corporate director of Clinical Informatics Research and Development (CIRD) at Partners Healthcare System, and assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, and of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is adjunct faculty at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Graduate School of Information Science in Health in Munich, Germany, and in the division of biomedical informatics at the University of California, San Diego.
John Halamka, MD, is one of the foremost CIOs in the industry today. Currently, he serves as CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Halamka completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University in Calif., where he received a degree in medical microbiology and a degree in public policy with a focus on technology issues. He entered medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, while simultaneously pursuing graduate work in bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on technology issues in medicine. Dr. Halamka integrates his knowledge of medicine and technology focusing on the use of the Internet to exchange clinical patient data. His research includes security/confidentiality issues, scalability issues, and implementation of standards for exchange of administrative and clinical information. Dr. Halamka is also an active teacher, lecturing on both medical and technology topics to the students, residents and faculty of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
