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Expert Recommendations for Electronic Prescribing Systems
Advisory Board
Donald M. Berwick - Chair | Phyllis C. Borzi | Lonnie R. Bristow
Christine K. Cassel | Schumarry H. Chao | Paul B. Ginsburg
Peter I. Juhn | Helene Levens Lipton | Clement J. McDonald
Mary O'Neil Mundinger | Margaret E. O'Kane
Donald M. Berwick - Chair (MD, Harvard Medical School, MPP, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) is President and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). The IHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of health care systems through education, research, and demonstration projects, and through fostering collaboration among health care organization and their leaders. Dr. Berwick is Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Health Care Policy at the Harvard Medical School. He is also a pediatrician, an Associate in Pediatrics at Boston's Children's Hospital and a Consultant in Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Berwick has published over 100 scientific articles in numerous professional journals on subjects relating to health care policy, decision analysis, technology assessment, and health care quality management. His research and commentaries have appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The British Medical Journal, and others. Books he has co-authored include Curing Health Care and New Rules: Regulation, Markets and the Quality of American Health Care. Currently Chair of the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, from 1996 through 1999, Dr. Berwick served as the first "Independent Member" of the Board of Trustees of the American Hospital Association. Dr. Berwick was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry in 1997 and 1998. Co-chaired by the Secretaries of Health and Human Services and Labor, the Commission was charged with developing a broader understanding of the issues facing rapidly evolving healthcare delivery system and to help build consensus on ways to assure and improve the quality of health care.
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Phyllis C. Borzi (JD, Catholic University Law School, MA, Syracuse University) is a Research Professor at the Center for Health Services Research and Policy, The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, The George Washington University Medical Center. She is also the co-director of the School's Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program. Ms. Borzi is involved in legal and policy analysis relating to employer-sponsored employee health benefits, health insurance, legislative and regulatory issues, managed care and large group purchasers, and access to health care for workers, retirees, and their families. Ms. Borzi is also a practicing lawyer at the Washington, DC, firm of O'Donoghue & O'Donoghue, where she specializes in employee benefit plan issues, including health and pension benefits and discrimination based on age and disability. She is known nationally for her expertise in issues arising under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), a federal law covering private sector employee benefit plans and has spoken and written widely on these issues. From 1979 to 1995, Ms. Borzi was the Pension and Employee Benefit Counsel for the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor (now called the Committee on Education and the Workforce). She co-chairs the Employee Benefit Committee of the American Bar Association's Committee on Labor and Employment Law and frequently chairs and/or participates on the faculty of continuing education programs for lawyers, health professionals, and others involved in employer-sponsored employee benefit plans.
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Lonnie R. Bristow (MD, New York University College of Medicine) is a former President of the American Medical Association and served as Vice Chair and Chair of the AMA's Board of Trustees. Dr. Bristow has written and lectured extensively on medical science as well as socio-economic and ethical issues related to medicine. He is a board-certified internist and has practiced medicine for more than 30 years. Dr. Bristow's research interests and expertise are eclectic and, over the decades, have included medical ethics, socialized medicine as practiced in Great Britain and Canada, health care financing in America, professional liability insurance problems, sickle cell anemia, and coronary care unit utilization. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Bristow is presently serving as Vice Chair for the Physician Leadership for a New Drug Policy and, by Presidential appointment, he has filled the post of Chair, Board of Regents of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. He is a reviewer of the Journal of the American Medical Association and a contributing editor to The Internist. Dr. Bristow has recently retired from private practice but continues his other activities as a Professional Consultant.
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Christine K. Cassel (MD, University of Massachusetts Medical School) is Professor and Chair of Geriatrics, Dean of the School of Medicine and Vice President for Medical Affairs at Oregon Health and Science University. Previously Dr. Cassel was the Henry L. Schwartz Professor of Geriatrics and Medicine and Chair of the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She joined Mount Sinai in 1995 after ten years at the University of Chicago, where she was Chief of General Internal Medicine, Professor of Medicine and Public Policy Studies, Director of the Center on Aging, Health and Society, Director of the Center for Health Policy Research, Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, and George M. Eisenberg Professor in Geriatrics. Throughout her career she has brought together the biomedical, ethical and policy issues in general internal medicine and geriatrics. Dr. Cassel took her internal medicine training at Children's Hospital of San Francisco and at the University of California, San Francisco, followed by fellowships in bioethics at the University of California in 1979 and geriatrics at the University of Oregon and the Portland Oregon Veterans Administration Medical Center in 1981. She has served as the 1998-99 Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine and President of the American College of Physicians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Society for Health and Human Values. In addition, she is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Association of American Physicians, and is currently Vice Chair of the Board of the Greenwall Foundation.
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Schumarry H. Chao (MD, University of California Medical School, San Francisco, MBA, University of Southern California) is Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President of Strategic Development at MedImpact Health Care Systems, Inc. where she provides direction, supervision and support for medical issues in product development and pharmacy benefits management. She also drives the development of medical informatics initiatives and leads senior management in the development of strategic and marketing plans. Dr. Chao has successful leadership and strategic and operational experience on all sides of the healthcare industry: insurer, delivery system management, employer, pharmaceutical, and healthcare information technology. On the insurer side, Dr. Chao served as Vice President and Corporate Medical Director for Aetna Life and Casualty Company. In addition to her medical management responsibilities, she represented Aetna in numerous seminars, media events, and political meetings as Aetna's official national spokesperson on healthcare reform and policies. On the employer side, Dr. Chao developed and implemented managed care health benefit strategies for the University of Southern California's l0,000 employees and Security Pacific Bank's 57,000 employees with line responsibility for budget and quality performance. On the delivery system side, Dr. Chao directed Emergency Trauma for Los Angeles County, managed a pre-paid health plan and delivery system and served as Chief Medical Officer for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. She is also Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine and Family Medicine as well as Adjunct Associate Professor of Pharmaco-economics at University of Southern California.
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Paul B. Ginsburg (PhD, Harvard University) is an economist and health policy expert. He is currently the President of the Center for Studying Health System Change, an independent research organization in Washington, D.C., that is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Center analyzes how the health system is changing, assesses the implications of those changes on consumers, and communicates its findings to policy makers and the public at large. Previously, Dr. Ginsburg was the founding executive director of the Physician Payment Review Commission (PPRC), currently the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Under Dr. Ginsburg's leadership, the PPRC developed the Medicare physician payment reform proposal that was enacted by Congress in 1989. He served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Association for Health Services Research and is a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Dr. Ginsburg previously worked for the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, California, and for the Congressional Budget Office.
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Peter I. Juhn (MD, Harvard University, MPH, University of Washington) was the founder of CareTouch Inc., an e-health subsidiary of Kaiser Permanente. Prior to starting CareTouch, Inc., Dr. Juhn was the founding Executive Director of Kaiser-Permanente's Care Management Institute (CMI). Dr. Juhn lead this national institute responsible for developing systematic approaches to the management of major health conditions and facilitating their adoption and implementation. Programs included diabetes, asthma, and cardiac conditions, focused on sharing data-based measures and provider and patient knowledge tools to drive care improvement and resource efficiency. During his seven years as a senior executive at Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Juhn's responsibilities also included strategic assessment of the next generation of clinical data and information systems, including interactive telecommunications (web and telephone-based) and provider- and patient-based telemedicine systems. He was the Executive Sponsor of the Permanente Knowledge Connection (physician-based medical knowledge on the Web) and the original KP Direct initiative (member-based health information on the Web), now known as KP Online. Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente he was a Senior Fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington, where he was also a member of the federally funded Back Pain Patient Outcomes Research Team (PORT). Dr. Juhn is board certified in internal medicine.
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Helene Levens Lipton (PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison) is Professor of Health Policy and Pharmacy, Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Institute for Health Policy Studies, Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Lipton has long-standing research and teaching interests in pharmaceutical innovations and their impact on patient-provider relationships and quality and costs of care. She has conducted NIH-funded randomized controlled trials of interventions (including computerized feedback systems) designed to improve the quality and economy of physicians' prescribing practices and patients' drug use. She has examined the impact of pharmaceutical benefit management strategies in managed care organizations as well as the impact of market-driven health reform on physicians and pharmacists. Dr. Lipton has served as an advisor to a collaborative of 40 health care organizations regarding state-of-the-science methods to improve physicians' prescribing practices and the quality of patient care sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Current research projects include: (1) an RWJ-funded study examining whether and how physician groups' assumption of financial risk for drug costs spurs innovations in drug use management and clinical process re-design (including electronic prescribing); (2) a Kaiser Family Foundation study on policy options under Medicare for an expanded outpatient drug benefit; and (3) a study of issues surrounding the nature and impact of electronic prescribing technologies, funded by RWJ.
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Clement J. McDonald (MD) is Director of the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care, Regenstrief Professor and Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Chief of the Computer Science Research Group at Regenstrief Institute, and staff physician at Wishard Memorial Hospital at the Indiana University Medical Center. A pioneer in medical informatics, he developed one of the first electronic medical record systems (in 1972), which now carries 300 million clinical observations and is in use at a number of hospitals. He is the principal investigator for the National Library of Medicine research grant entitled "Health Applications for the National Infrastructure: Indianapolis Regional Network for Primary and Emergency Care: Next Step Toward an EMR", an electronic medical record network that ties the emergency rooms of all major Indianapolis hospitals to assist in the delivery of emergency care. Dr. McDonald also leads the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC®) project that is developing universal codes and names for laboratory and clinical observations, and is Co-Chairman of the HL7 Orders/Observations Technical Committee. He has been the chairman of the ASTM E31.11 Subcommittee for Developing Standards for Electronic Transmission of Clinical Data, and a chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Health Information Standards Planning Panel. He is former chair of the American College of Physicians' Medical Informatics Subcommittee, former president of the American Medical Informatics Association, and is founding editor of MD Computing, a Springer-Verlag international journal. Dr. McDonald was elected to the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine in 1994.
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Mary O'Neil Mundinger (DrPH Columbia University School of Public Health) is Dean of the Columbia University School of Nursing and Centennial Professor in Health Policy. She is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Nursing, and the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Mundinger currently sits on the board of directors of United HealthCare and Cell Therapeutics, Inc.. In 1993 President Clinton appointed her to the Health Professionals Review Group, which analyzed the President's plan to reform the health care system before he presented it to Congress. Dr. Mundinger served as a member of the Commonwealth Fund Commission on Women's Health from 1993-98 and was a founder and the first President of Friends on the National Institute for Nursing Research.In 1984-85 she received the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship and worked as a staff member for Senator Kennedy on the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. In 1998 she was named Nurse Practitioner of the Year by The Nurse Practitioner: The American Journal of Primary Health Care. Author of Home Care Controversy: Too Little, Too Costly (1983) and Autonomy in Nursing (1980), Dr. Mundinger is a noted health policy expert, primarily known for her work on workforce issues and primary care.
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Margaret E. O'Kane (MHS, Health Administration and Planning, Johns Hopkins University) is President of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to improve the quality of health care everywhere. Under Ms. O'Kane's leadership, NCQA has developed broad support among the employer and health plan communities; today many Fortune 100 companies prefer to do business with NCQA Accredited health plans. About three quarters of the nation's largest employers use Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) data to evaluate the plans that serve their employees. Ms. O'Kane was named Health Person of the Year in 1996 by the journal Medicine & Health. She also received a 1997 Founder's Award from The American College of Medical Quality, recognizing NCQA's efforts to improve managed care quality. In 1999, Ms. O'Kane was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine, an organization that is frequently called on to help shape national health care policy. In 2000, Ms. O'Kane received the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention award, the agency's highest honor.
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