Annual Meeting 2019

Thank you for attending this year’s Annual Meeting!

Slides and recordings from the sessions are now available below.

Meet the 2019 Speakers

Eric D. Hargan, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)

Eric D. Hargan is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS is dedicated to promoting and enhancing the health and well-being of the American people, and as the largest department in the federal government has an annual budget in excess of $1.3 trillion and over 80,000 employees across 26 divisions. As Deputy Secretary, he is the Chief Operating Officer and is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations and management of the department in addition to leading policy and strategy development.

Mr. Hargan was sworn into office as Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on October 6, 2017. He immediately served as Acting Secretary of HHS from October 2017 to January 2018.

From 2003 to 2007, Mr. Hargan served at HHS in a variety of capacities, including holding the position of Acting Deputy Secretary. During his tenure at HHS, Mr. Hargan also served as the Department’s Regulatory Policy Officer, where he oversaw the development and approval of all HHS, CMS, and FDA regulations and significant guidances.

Steven Lane, MD
Clinical Informatics Director for Privacy, Information Security & Interoperability, Sutter Health 

Dr. Steven Lane is a practicing primary care physician and clinical informaticist who is passionate about health information technology and its potential to improve the care we provide in our communities, and around the world. At Sutter Health, in Northern California, he serves as Clinical Informatics Director for Privacy, Information Security & Interoperability. Dr. Lane has been a leader in advocating for interoperability in California and around the country through lowering barriers to information sharing and optimizing the utility of the data exchanged. As a Health IT Advisory Committee member, Dr. Lane serves as Interoperability Standards Priorities Co-Chair, and is a member of U.S. Core Data for Interoperability and Information Blocking.

Dave Cassel
Executive Director, Carequality

Mr. Cassel has worked over 20 years in health information technology, creating a national reputation as an expert in health information exchange. As Executive Director of Carequality, Dave is responsible for the Carequality Interoperability Framework which enables health data sharing across and among different types of networks. Under his leadership, the national-level trusted exchange framework was first implemented in July 2016 and has rapidly grown to include more than 600,000 providers across more than 1,500 hospitals and 40,000 clinics, currently sharing more than 56 million documents a month.

Michael George
IT Director, Lutheran Senior Services

Michael George is IT Director for Lutheran Senior Services based in St. Louis, MO, with responsibility for IT Applications and Health Information Management.  Michael has been with LSS for four years—first as the IT Clinical Analyst, and has been serving as IT Director for the past two years.  During his tenure at LSS, Michael has shepherded LSS forward to be at the forefront of Senior Living Organizations for technology adoption and use.  Along with his Team, Michael works daily to ensure that through technology use he is committed to the LSS Mission of “Older Adults Living Life to the Fullest.”  Michael has been a Registered Nurse for over 20 years and has been focused on technology use in Health Care for over 15 years.

Didi Davis
VP, Informatics, Conformance and Interoperability, The Sequoia Project

Mrs. Davis has more than 25 years’ experience in the healthcare industry with emphasis in the conformance testing, implementation, development, and management of information technology solutions and healthcare workflow requirements.  She serves as the VP, Informatics, Conformance and Interoperability for the Sequoia Project that is a 501(c)3 not for profit organization based in Washington, DC.  Her expertise includes connecting people, processes and technology.  She is responsible for the RSNA Image Share Validation programs in partnership with the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) also managed by Sequoia.

Hans J. Buitendijk, M.Sc., FHL7, 
Director, Interoperability Strategy, Cerner Corporation

For more than 35 years Hans Buitendijk has been involved in the development of HIT solutions, client consulting on strategic IT planning, health care application development and implementations, large scale business process re-engineering and systems integration, and complex project management, bridging the gap between business process optimization and IT support. As Director of Interoperability Strategy at Cerner, Hans primarily focuses on establishing, propagating, and promoting industry standards to enable interoperability across the diverse systems prevalent in health IT.  He represents Cerner in various industry organizations/initiatives to advance interoperability such as HL7, Da Vinci, IHE, EHRA, CommonWell, and Carequality to increase adoption of standards-based interoperability.

Genevieve Morris
Founder 
Integral Health Strategies (IHS)

Genevieve Morris is the founder of Integral Health Strategies (IHS), which provides health IT policy and strategy consulting services to the industry. She is also a candidate for Maryland’s 2nd Congressional District. Prior to starting IHS, Ms. Morris most recently served as the Chief Health Information Officer (CHIO) for the VA’s Office of EHR Modernization on a detail from HHS, where she served as the Principal Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT at ONC.  In her time at ONC, Ms. Morris led the development of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, an effort to create a single agreement between health information networks, enabling nationwide interoperability. Ms. Morris also provided policy direction for ONC’s development of regulations, policies, and procedures.  Prior to serving as the Principal Deputy National Coordinator, Ms. Morris worked as a consultant to ONC in a variety of areas such as policy, standards and technology, and grant programs. Among her outputs were reports to support the State Health Information Exchange Program, including reports on consumer engagement in health information exchange, provider directories, and query-based health information exchange. Most notably, Ms. Morris supported the development of the Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap, including writing and editing portions of the roadmap. This important document provides guidance to all health IT stakeholders on the actions that must be taken in order to achieve a truly interoperable learning health system.

.

Doc DeVore
Director, Enterprise Interoperabliity
MatrixCare

Mr. DeVore started his 25+ year career in long term and post-acute care with a multi-facility skilled nursing chain. He is a strong promoter of a standards based open API so that providers have better information and patients receive better care. He is a frequent guest speaker at industry events. Mr. DeVore is a Past President of the National Association in Support of Long Term Care (NASL), served on the CCHIT Advisory Task Force and the HL7 Long Term Care Functional Profile Workgroup. Mr. DeVore is a current member of the Carequality Advisory Council. He was an active member of the Carequality FHIR Tiger Team.

Micky Tripathi
President & CEO 
Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative

Mr. Tripathi is the president and CEO of Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a non-profit health IT advisory and clinical data analytics company. Micky is also active in the industry at a local and national level, including being on the Board of Directors of the New England Health Exchange Network (NEHEN), the Sequoia Project, the CARIN Alliance, and the FHIR Foundation and the Project Manager of the Argonaut Project, an industry collaboration to accelerate the adoption of FHIR. He is also an Affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Bart Carlson
Founder & CEO
Azuba

Bart Carlson is the Founder/CEO of Azuba Health, a cloud-based secure Healthdata-as-a-Service (HaaS) platform that provides a secure, consolidated, accessible digital lifetime health record for every patient that is shareable with doctors and others for better health and health care. He is also the Co-Founder/CEO of Napersoft, a company specializing in customer communications management software solutions for large insurance companies, banks and government agencies.

Alan Swenson
Vice President, Interoperability
Kno2

Alan Swenson is Vice President of Interoperability at Kno2, where his focus is on improving interoperability across the entire continuum of care. Alan is responsible for overseeing specific projects aimed to extend interoperability into hard to reach markets, and groups not previously part of government incentive programs to drive interoperability, such as LTPAC, behavioral health, emergency medical services, and more. Alan has been involved with Carequality since its creation, the eHealth Exchange and the Sequoia Project before that. He is currently a member of the Carequality Steering Committee, previously chaired the Carequality Advisory Council, and has participated in numerous workgroups.

Alan is currently the Vice-Chair of the IT Committee for The National Association for the Support of Long Term Care (NASL). He is also actively involved in committees and workgroups of HIMSS, ONC, CommonWell Health Alliance, among other industry interoperability initiatives.

Holly Miller, MD, MBA, FHIMSS
Chief Medical Officer
MedAllies

For over 10 years, Dr. Miller has been the Chief Medical Officer of MedAllies, a company that leverages HIT and clinical practice transformation to improve healthcare value. MedAllies operates one of the leading Health Information Service Provider (HISP) networks in support of interoperability.  At MedAllies, Dr. Miller provides operational, tactical, and strategic collaborative leadership. Dr. Miller is currently a co-chair or member of many Health Information Technology Interoperability related commitees and workgroups engaged in enhancing healthcare value. These include committees within the following organizations: The Sequoia Project; Carequality; DaVinci; CMS: DRLS,  PACIO, EMDI, 360X; DirectTrust; Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE); NCQA; HIMSS; and KLAS. She continues to be a frequent speaker at national conferences. 

John Henry Downing
Technical Project Manager
Zen Healthcare IT

John Henry Downing is the Manager of Zen Healthcare IT’s Service Desk, a team that provides on-demand interoperability engineering support for HIE’s and healthcare organizations across the U.S., including troubleshooting for eHealth Exchange and Carequality projects.

John Henry has over five years of experience working directly with healthcare organizations as an analyst & engineer. In his role leading eHealth Exchange and Carequality implementations at Zen, he often works closely with the Sequoia staff and is considered a trusted Subject Matter Expert by the Sequoia communities. He spearheaded several successful onboarding initiatives to both networks for participants ranging from small primary-source participants to statewide HIEs. He is currently leading the deployment of Zen’s Stargate technology to support both Carequality and eHealth Exchange use cases.  Stargate is a component of Zen’s Gemini Integration as a Service Platform.

Jennifer Blumenthal
Co-Founder & CEO
OneRecord

Jennifer Blumenthal is the Co-founder and CEO of OneRecord. OneRecord is rooted in our personal experiences dealing with chronic illness and was founded on the belief that the current US healthcare system needs a better patient experience for the next generation. OneRecord is a consumer facing application that enables users to access and aggregate their medical records through a hybrid approach of IHE standards including  XCA/XCPD and  HL7 FHIR transactions to create a clean longitudinal health record using a proprietary machine learning reconciliation and deduplication process. The application is secure, scalable and device agnostic.

Matt Becker
Technical Services
Epic

Over the past 12 years at Epic, Matt has focused on the success of customers and the growth of his team. As an interoperability lead for Epic, he been the Epic subject matter expert in several industry-wide initiatives, including Carequality workgroups and ONC Tiger Teams.