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MITRE at HIMSS11

Combining new research in health information technology with systems engineering expertise, MITRE's Center for Transforming Health works daily to imagine and achieve better solutions for the nation's healthcare system. Discover what MITRE is doing at HIMSS11 using the links at right.

Executive Leadership

Robert Jensen, Executive Director, Center for Transforming Health
As executive director of MITRE's Center for Transforming Health, Mr. Jensen leads an organization dedicated to breakthrough ideas in health information technology. He guides the development of the healthcare program at MITRE that currently advises the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and other federal health agencies.

In his current role, Mr. Jensen provides strategic counsel to HHS on their initiatives to expand the use of electronic health records and improve healthcare performance through measurement and new acquisition practices. He directs MITRE's advisement on the Federal Health Architecture initiative for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He also provides executive direction to MITRE's health research program. Under his leadership, MITRE developed medCafe, an open source tool, which allows clinicians to quickly build, modify, and customize their patients' electronic health records, as well as hData, a candidate for the new data transport standard that addresses interoperability issues of the Health Level 7 Clinical Document Architecture.

Mr. Jensen has more than 27 years of experience in forming and leading technical and non-technical teams; designing and implementing new and improved systems and processes; and managing large, complex enterpriselevel programs. His expertise encompasses project management, system development, and federal acquisition support. He also is experienced in a wide range of additional domains, including enterprise systems analysis, strategic planning, staffing, contracting and negotiations, customer service, and client management. Mr. Jensen guides MITRE's relationships within the health community including conferences, professional associations, presentations, publications, and partnerships that facilitate the development of integrated solutions that best serve the public interest.

Mr. Jensen spent 12 years in the U.S. Marine Corps as a logistics and data systems officer. He joined MITRE in 1994 and has managed and contributed to large-scale programs for multiple MITRE sponsors, including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. He is a member of HIMSS, Health Level 7, International Association of Emergency Managers, IEEE Computer Society, and the Project Management Institute. Mr. Jensen holds a BA in Psychology from Doane College and an MS in Information Systems from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Bruce Gordon, HHS Portfolio Manager, Center for Transforming Health
As the Health and Human Services (HHS) portfolio manager within MITRE's Center for Transforming Health, Mr. Gordon directs the planning and execution for MITRE-supported HHS projects. Mr. Gordon provides program management guidance to the Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, including support for the Federal Health Architecture, along with other areas of HHS. For the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), he manages direct project support and leadership for programs involved with quality, metrics, and pay-for-performance. These include payments for end-stage renal disease services, as well as quality metrics for pay-for-performance programs for acute care hospitals. Mr. Gordon also provided leadership to senior enterprise architects and staff in the Center for Enterprise Modernization, the federally funded research and development center that MITRE operates on behalf of the IRS and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Mr. Gordon is a respected speaker at national symposia on health financial systems. Prior to joining MITRE, he was a vice president with AMS (now CGI), where he was responsible for its health plan services practice. In that role, Mr. Gordon managed AMS's relationships with CMS and the private healthcare payer industry. In addition, he coordinated the implementation of AMS's provider administrative software product and oversaw the construction of CMS's current master provider database, as well as the revamping of its Internet presence for Medicare beneficiaries. He also served as the vice president for management information services at the New York Insurance Exchange. Mr. Gordon holds a BA in Mathematics from the City University of New York and has done graduate work in computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

John Piescik, MBA, Innovation Program Manager, Center for Transforming Health
Mr. Piescik manages MITRE's health research investment portfolio. He developed MITRE's health research strategy, which focuses on integrating health IT systems, empowering patients, accelerating biomedical research, and rationalizing government health investments. He directs the work of MITRE research teams that collaborate with Harvard University, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University, the Brookings Institution, the University of Virginia, and many others. He also reviews relevant MITRE research in areas such as metagenomics, biosecurity, forensic genomics, bioinformatics, and collaborative tools for multi-site and multi-institution research for applicability to health programs.

Mr. Piescik also oversees MITRE's work for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has included bioinformatics infrastructure planning and scientific and public communications projects for the National Cancer Institute. He assisted the National Library of Medicine with data exchange standards and emerging technology analysis for the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Program, a three-way partnership of the Naval National Medical Center, Suburban Hospital, and the NIH Clinical Center. In addition, he developed an impact plan for NIH, including a survey.

Mr. Piescik led an acquisition support project for the Medicare Modernization Program for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to select Medicare Administrative Contractors who will manage provider relationships and process annual claims of about $300 billion for more than 42 million beneficiaries. In 2007, he contributed to a congressionally-mandated review of the National Disaster Medical System. He spent 19 years with American Management Systems, Inc., a global software and systems integration firm, where he helped build a healthcare workflow systems practice and consulted extensively for federal agencies. Mr. Piescik is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and HIMSS. He holds a BA in Government from Georgetown University and an MBA in Public and Private Management from Yale University.

Joy Keeler Tobin, MBA, FHIMSS, Health IT Program Manager, Center for Transforming Health
As the health IT program manager in MITRE's Center for Transforming Health, Ms. Tobin plays a lead role in the health information technology activities of the company. She provides operational management of health IT initiatives with the public and private sectors, including projects across the federal government and MITRE-funded research initiatives to advance health interoperability. She oversees MITRE activities in support of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Federal Health Architecture Program.

Ms. Tobin has served in national advisory roles including the HIMSS Board of Directors, Chair of the Nicholas E. Davies Award Committee, Joint Commission Expert Panel on Health Information Technology, National Rural Health Conference Planning Committee, and Advance for Health Information Executives Editorial Board. She was recognized by the WITI Chicago Regional Network with its 2004 Excellence in Corporate IT Leadership Award.

Prior to joining MITRE, Ms. Tobin was deputy director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) National Resource Center for Health Information Technology. Ms. Tobin was central to developing the strategy, operational infrastructure, and partnerships and overseeing daily operations of large and complex multi-year projects to support the deployment of health IT.

Prior to joining AHRQ, Ms. Tobin was associate vice chancellor for health affairs and Chief Information Officer at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she led the six-year strategic and technical drive to implement an advanced clinical information system. The Medical Center’s electronic health record received the 2001 Nicholas E. Davies Award of Excellence and the 2003 Enterprise Value Award by CIO magazine. She is a member of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) Board of Commissioners, and holds a BS in Biological Sciences from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from Rollins College.

Thought Leadership

Beth Halley, RN, MBA, Principal Healthcare Consultant
Ms. Halley is engaged in numerous national health information technology efforts. She is currently appointed to the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Committee and serves as its Chair. Her recent involvement has included leading the Consolidated Health Informatics initiative of the Federal Health Architecture program within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. She also co-chaired the national nursing Technology Informatics Guiding Educational Reform (TIGER) Standards and Interoperability Collaborative. She has presented to national audiences and authored numerous articles on nursing informatics and health IT, including co-authoring the chapter, "Standards and Interoperability" in "Nursing Informatics: Where Technology and Caring Meet."

Ms. Halley currently supports the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) End-Stage Renal Disease Quality Incentive Program. This is the first CMS value-based purchasing program designed to ensure high quality care through an incentive payment program. In her work on healthcare information systems planning and implementation, she has collaborated with numerous healthcare organizations and federal agencies, including Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense, Office of Management and Budget, and National Institute of Standards and Technology. Ms. Halley holds a BS in Nursing from the University of Delaware and an MBA from George Mason University.

Gail Hamilton, Group Leader, Leading Edge Data Integration
Ms. Hamilton is a team leader and system designer specializing in prototype development for webbased systems and information analysis for data dissemination. Her focus is on providing complex data to end users through easy-to-understand interfaces. Currently, she serves as principal investigator for medCafe, a MITRE-developed prototype system that is exploring new ways for clinicians to view health records. It employs a composable software framework that allows clinicians to build their personal view of health records on a per patient basis.

With more than 15 years' experience as a software engineer and systems consultant, Ms. Hamilton has developed systems in use nationwide in such wideranging fields as neuroscience and aviation. In the healthcare domain, she developed systems to allow data sharing and content-based retrieval of MRI images for researchers at Johns Hopkins. She was a primary developer of neuroMorpho.org, the world's largest web-accessible repository service for digitally reconstructed neurons. She is the primary developer for MRALD, an open source application designed to rapidly provide a web-based interface to any existing database. Ms. Hamilton holds a BSc (Honors) in Physics from the University of Glasgow and has authored or co-authored multiple papers on information systems.

Linda Koontz, CIPP, Group Leader, Strategic Privacy Planning
Ms. Koontz leads MITRE's Strategic Privacy practice, guiding seniorlevel staff at various federal government agencies on strategic approaches to building privacy into their organizations. Most recently, she has provided direct support on privacy systems to the federal healthcare and intelligence communities. Specifically, Ms. Koontz is currently supporting the Chief Privacy Officer in the Office of the National Coordinator on Health Information Technology on privacy issues associated with nationwide health information exchange. Previously, she worked with other experts on the Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation program to develop a privacy and security framework for the exchange of personal health information. She has also provided privacy advice and support to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and currently is a member of a subcommittee of the DHS's Data Protection and Integrity Advisory Committee.

Ms. Koontz has more than 30 years' experience in information systems management and technology. Prior to joining MITRE, she served as the Director, Information Management for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). In that role, she directed a broad portfolio of congressionally-requested studies, producing nearly two dozen GAO reports on various information management topics. More than a third of these dealt specifically with privacy, and Ms. Koontz has testified numerous times before congressional committees as an expert witness on government privacy issues. She holds a BA in Accounting from Michigan State University and is a Certified Information Privacy Professional with a specialization in Government.

Maggie Lohnes, RN, FHIMSS, Healthcare Principal
Ms. Lohnes is responsible for clinical informatics and community outreach initiatives for the popHealth clinical quality measure project. She was appointed to the National Quality Forum (NQF) National Patient Priorities Evaluation Advisory Panel in 2010. As a member of the HIMSS Patient Safety and Quality Outcomes Committee and past Chair of the HIMSS Public Policy Committee, she recently served as leader for the HIMSS Public Policy Principles Task Force. Ms. Lohnes served on the HIMSS Board of Southern California Chapter as president from 1999 to 2001. Her work in clinical informatics was highlighted in the book, "Reengineering Healthcare," by Jim Champy and Harry Greenspun, MD. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal for Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare.

Prior to joining MITRE, Ms. Lohnes served as administrator for clinical information management at MultiCare Health System, Tacoma, Washington and was the information systems manager for physician computer services at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. She received her diploma in Registered Nursing from Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center School of Nursing, possesses an active nursing license in the states of Washington and California, and has completed graduate work in Nursing Leadership at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Ms. Lohnes also has a BA in English Literature from UCLA.

Rob McCready, Principal Software Systems Engineer
Mr. McCready is the technical lead for MITRE's open source popHealth project, a health informatics and rapid development activity that is funded by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The popHealth project integrates with a provider's electronic health record (EHR) system to produce summary quality measures on the provider's patient population. It also streamlines the reporting of these measures to public health agencies. Mr. McCready is responsible for the popHealth project's operations and software development. Since 2009, popHealth has evolved from a feasibility demonstration to an open source reference implementation prepared for use in U.S. EHR systems. Mr. McCready is leading the work to enhance popHealth as a reference implementation, generating all 44 Meaningful Use Stage 1 Quality Measures.

Mr. McCready also led MITRE's internal R&D project, Laika, another open source project. Laika is the testing framework used by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) as part of its EHR certification process. He also investigated using data communication with home-based medical devices, and developed software to support device interoperability for MITRE's HealthStation and HealthCard prototypes. Mr. McCready holds a BS in Physics from Boston College and an MS in Computer Science from Boston University.

Peter Mork, Ph.D., Lead Database Technology Software Engineer
Dr. Mork has more than 12 years of experience in biomedical and health informatics; he specializes in information management including integration, sharing, discovery, security, and privacy. His MITREfunded research project, Enforceable Specification of Privacy, allows patients to specify privacy policies that are easy to understand and enforce. Dr. Mork and his colleague, Lisa Tutterow, will present the project’s findings at the 2011 HIMSS Conference during the session "Meaningful Privacy Choices: The Challenges of Granular Patient Consent." He is also a key contributor to the related Data Reuse Agreement project. This research develops techniques to minimize how often patients must provide consent, while maximizing the control they have over their medical information, including sensitive areas like mental health data.

Dr. Mork is a senior technical adviser in MITRE's Innovative Information Engineering and Biometrics Department. He is author and co-author on numerous publications and regularly presents his work at international conferences. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Issues in Healthcare from Saint Olaf College, an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on biomedical and health informatics from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Lisa Tutterow, Healthcare Principal
Ms. Tutterow has spent her career engaged in expanding and enhancing the use of health information technology. As a healthcare principal within MITRE's Center for Transforming Health, she supports the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to develop policy guidance on privacy and security. As part of this work, she assists the Health IT Policy Committee's Privacy and Security Tiger Team to frame issues and prepare recommendations for ONC. At the 2011 HIMSS Conference, she and colleague Peter Mork will present research findings at the session "Meaningful Privacy Choices: The Challenges of Granular Patient Consent."

Ms. Tutterow has also collaborated with the ONC Meaningful Use Division on popHealth, an open source software tool. The MITRE-developed popHealth uses data from a variety of electronic health record platforms to help providers identify opportunities to improve patient care. She also works on Cypress, a certification testbed for evaluating clinical quality measures as part of demonstrating meaningful use of health information technology. Before she joined MITRE, Ms. Tutterow directed the implementation of Kaiser Permanente's electronic health information system in the Mid-Atlantic States Region. She holds a BS in Environmental Science from the University of Virginia and an MS in Environmental Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech.