The National eHealth Collaborative’s (NeHC) Board of Directors announced Friday the election of seven new board members.

According to NeHC, the new board members include:

• Simon Cohn, MD, associate executive director, Health Information Policy, Kaiser Permanente Foundation, who will serve as chairman of the board; 
• Holt Anderson, executive director, North Carolina Healthcare Information & Communications Alliance (NCHICA);
• David W. Baker, MD, professor, Department of Medicine; Chief of General Internal Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University;
• Alice Brown, Health Information Technology Policy Director, National Partnership for Women and Families;
• C. Martin Harris, MD, chairman of Information Technology Division, Cleveland Clinic;
• Patricia MacTaggart, lead research scientist, George Washington University;
• Charles Parker, executive director, Continua Health Alliance.

"Given NeHC’s role as a forum for broad stakeholder engagement in developing real-world solutions that identify and address gaps and barriers to broad implementation of health information exchange, it was important to the NeHC Nominations Committee that we recommended candidates who were truly representative of the diversity in stakeholder communities across the field of health IT," said NeHC Nominations Committee Chair Janet Corrigan, president and CEO of the National Quality Forum. "We have added some exciting new talents to our board today and we look forward to working with them through 2011."

"I am delighted to welcome new members to the NeHC Board of Directors who bring such an impressive breadth of knowledge and experience from across the healthcare and health IT landscape," added Cohn. "We enter 2011 with a strong vision and a new CEO, so I am confident that this board will move swiftly toward achieving our goals for the organization."

NeHC said it also welcomed its new CEO Kate Berry and hosted its first stakeholder forum of 2011 as part of Friday's board of directors meeting.