October 19, 2012 at 11 am in ITE 456

Presented by the Department of Information Systems, UMBC

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Abstract

It is widely recognized that the nation requires a Learning Health System (LHS) to provide higher quality, safer, and more affordable health care. An LHS is one that can routinely and securely aggregate data from disparate sources, convert the data to knowledge, and disseminate that knowledge, in actionable forms, to everyone who can benefit from it. Achieving a Learning Health System at national scale requires solution of a wide array of technology and policy problems and, as such, is the consummate challenge in health informatics. This presentation will describe the LHS, why it is vital to our future, the specific problems that must be addressed, and a pathway through which the nation might achieve an LHS.

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Short Bio

His appointment at Michigan follows 8 years of work for the federal government, prior to which Dr. Friedman served for 26 years as a university faculty member and administrator.

Most recently, Dr. Friedman held executive positions at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2007 to 2009 he was Deputy National Coordinator and from 2009 to 2011 he was ONC's Chief Scientific Officer. While at ONC, Friedman oversaw a diverse portfolio of nationwide activities that included development of a "learning health system", health IT research and workforce development programs, evaluation of ONC's programs, clinical decision support, and international cooperation for eHealth. He was the lead author of the first national health IT strategic plan which was released in June of 2008.

From 2003 to 2006 Dr. Friedman was Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine where he oversaw NLM's training and bioinformatics grant portfolios, and played a prominent role in developing the National Centers for Biomedical Computing. From 2006 to 2007, he served as an Associate Director and Chief Information Officer of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Prior to his work in the government, from 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor, Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics, and Founding Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. In these roles he functioned as Chief Information Officer of the university's schools of the health sciences and directed the Pittsburgh program for Integrated Advanced Information Systems (IAIMS). He also served for many years in a range of faculty and administrative roles at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He directed UNC's Office of Educational Development and served as Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Medical Informatics.

Dr. Friedman is an elected fellow and past president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. He was the Founding Chair of the Group on Information Resources of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

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PLEASE JOIN US FOR A RECEPTION IN ITE 456 IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING !!! HOSTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS