Steering Committee

Blackford Middleton, PCCDS Learning Network Steering Committee Chair and senior research team member, is Chief of Informatics and Innovation at Apervita, Inc., and Past-Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), and Instructor in the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in the Departments of Health Policy and Management, and Policy Translation and Leadership Development. Previously, he was a professor of Biomedical Informatics, and or of Medicine, at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities, and he held executive leadership roles at MedicaLogic/ Medscape, Partners Healthcare System, and at Vanderbilt.  Dr. Middleton’s work is focused on clinical informatics – the applied science surrounding strategy, design, implementation, and evaluation of clinical information systems in complex environments. Dr. Middleton is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and of HIMSS. Dr. Middleton studied Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received a Master’s in Public Health degree from the Yale University School of Public Health with a dual concentration in Chronic Disease Epidemiology, and Health Services Administration.  He received an MD from SUNY Buffalo, and was a resident in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Sciences Center. He completed an AHCPR Fellowship in General Internal Medicine at Stanford University, where he received his Master of Science degree in Health Services Research, focusing on clinical informatics.

Barry Blumenfeld, MD, MS, PCCDS Learning Network project director, is a Research Health IT Scientist in RTI International's Program for Digital Health and Clinical Informatics. Dr. Blumenfeld is based in Maine. He brings significant experience, leadership skills, and expertise in the PCOR and CDS communities to be an instrumental leader for the PCOR/CDS Learning Network. During a career spanning almost three decades in research, provider, and commercial organizations, he has consistently focused on the point of care information needs of practicing clinicians. He also has broad technical knowledge of the ways this is achieved, and has been a leader in the development of clinical documentation and decision support systems designed to embed knowledge in workflow. Dr. Blumenfeld is a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine. He received his medical degree from New Jersey Medical School and completed his internal medicine internship at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital of Boston. He also completed his MS in Intelligent Systems Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and completed his medical informatics fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Jerome A. Osheroff is a PCCDS Learning Network senior research team member. A general internist by training, he has spent the past 3 three decades building understanding of care delivery information needs, and helping ensure that people, processes and technology are successfully applied to fulfilling these needs better. Osheroff is the principal of TMIT Consulting, LLC, a firm he founded in 2011 to develop and implement pathways to better healthcare outcomes for care delivery organizations, government agencies, quality improvement organizations and HIT vendor clients.  He is recognized internationally as a leader in developing and applying health IT and clinical decision support-enabled approaches to improving health and care delivery.  Osheroff articulated the “CDS 5 Rights” framework, recommended by CMS as a best practice for improving patient care.  Osheroff has led work with government agencies, provider and health IT vendor organizations, clinicians and care teams, and others to develop many valuable healthcare quality improvement resources, most recently, HRSA's Guide to Improving Care Delivery Processes and Outcomes. He guides use of these strategies and tools in a growing portfolio of successful QI initiatives that are significantly improving care processes and outcomes. For the decade prior to starting TMIT, he was Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for Thomson Reuters Healthcare, where he ensured that their decision support offerings were optimally responsive to clinician, patient, and management information needs, and that they measurably improved healthcare outcomes.

Kensaku Kawamoto, PCCDS Learning Network senior research team member, is Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, Director of Knowledge Management and Mobilization, and Vice Chair for Clinical Informatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center. At the University of Utah, Dr. Kawamoto chairs the Clinical Decision Support committee and is a leader of the University’s Interoperable Apps and Services (IAPPS) initiative, which is a multi-stakeholder effort to enable standards-based, interoperable applications and software services to improve health and health care. Beyond the University of Utah, Dr. Kawamoto co-chairs the Clinical Decision Support Work Group of Health Level 7 International (HL7), the primary standards development organization in health IT. He also servedas co-Initiative Coordinator for the Clinical Quality Framework initiative, which was a public-private partnership sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to develop and validate a harmonized set of interoperability standards for clinical decision support and electronic clinical quality measurement. Dr. Kawamoto also founded and directs OpenCDS (www.opencds.org), which is a multi-institutional initiative to enable advanced, standards-based, and open-source clinical decision support and electronic clinical quality measurement at scale. Dr. Kawamoto is also a member of the U.S. Health IT Advisory Committee, which provides guidance to the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on policies, standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria related to health information technology.

Edwin Lomotan, PCCDS Learning Network (AHRQ) Project Officer, is a Medical Officer and Chief of Clinical Informatics for the Health IT Division in the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). His areas of focus include clinical decision support, health IT safety, and child health informatics. He leads AHRQ's initiative on clinical decision support and patient-centered outcomes research. Before joining AHRQ, Dr. Lomotan was Health IT Branch Chief in the Office of Quality and Data in the Bureau of Primary Health Care at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). While at HRSA, he led the Health Center-Controlled Network grant program, which was aimed at improving health care quality through health IT at community health centers across the country. Dr. Lomotan is board-certified in pediatrics and in clinical informatics. He received his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh and completed his pediatrics residency and informatics fellowship at Yale University. He spent several years in community-based pediatric practice in Connecticut before joining Federal service in 2010.

Brian S. Alper is the Founder of DynaMed and the Vice President of Innovations and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) Development for EBSCO Health. Dr. Alper has developed and scaled operations for systems to provide rapid access to valid clinical knowledge for health care professionals (DynaMed and DynaMed Plus) and patients (Patient Education Reference Center), employing hundreds of people to develop and maintain the content and user interfaces and reaching more than one million physicians worldwide with more than 25 uses per minute.  Dr. Alper has advanced research and development for evidence-based medicine for the community at large with methodology development, presentations and publications on randomized trials, systematic reviews, systematic literature surveillance, critical appraisal of clinical research, development and appraisal of clinical practice guidelines, and appraisal of appropriateness of clinical quality measures.  Recent developments of relevance to the Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support Learning Network include launching a system to provide evidence-based patient decision aids that can be customized for individual patients and integrated into clinical workflows to support shared decision making (EBSCO Health Option Grid) and participation in HL7 activities to extend FHIR for support of CDS and EBM.

Dr. Ancker is an Associate Professor of Health Informatics in the Department of Healthcare Policy & Research at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. She also serves as Editor of the new PCCDS journal section with eGEMS, Better Decisions Together. Her research centers on using health information technology to improve decisions and healthcare quality, especially by applying insights from behavioral science. She has a strong commitment to applying this work to help make healthcare more patient-centered, reduce healthcare disparities, and improve the fit between information technology and the work done by both providers and patients. Dr. Ancker is currently supported by a K award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and has also done research supported by the New York State Health Foundation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and the National Science Foundation. After a first career in daily journalism, she returned to school to earn her MPH in biostatistics and her PhD in biomedical informatics from Columbia University.

Leigh Burchell leads the Government Affairs function for Allscripts, including legislative advocacy and regulatory interpretation and comment.  Her role includes speaking on behalf of the company’s 180,000 physician clients across 45,000 ambulatory practices and 2,500 hospitals to ensure that new legislation and administrative policies are supportive of the most efficient paths towards improvements in the healthcare industry, as well as maximization of the many opportunities that exist to apply newfound data to greater benefit. She has been with Allscripts since 2000. Burchell is active in many industry associations, including serving as the most recent Chair of the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), a current Member of the Leadership Council and Chair Emeritus of the Policy Steering Committee for the eHealth Initiative (www.ehealthinitiative.org), and as Vice Chair of the HIMSS Public Policy Committee. Burchell graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, with a Bachelor of Arts in Constitutional History and American Studies.

Dr. Jim Jirjis is Chief Health Information Officer of the Clinical Services Group at HCA. Before joining HCA, Dr. Jirjis practiced Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), where he also served as the Medical Director of Primary Care and Chair of the Medical Records Committee. Dr. Jirjis was appointed Assistant Chief Medical Officer at VUMC in 2002, and in 2005, was promoted to Chief Medical Information Officer. Dr. Jirjis also had the honor of serving as Director of the Innovation Integration team at VUMC from 2009-2013. Dr. Jirjis has been a longtime champion of electronic medical record (EMR) adoption among the healthcare community. His accomplishments in EMR advancement include co-developing the VUMC StarPanel enterprise EMR and developing the MyHealthatVanderbilt patient web portal; the Star Tracker disease management tracking system; an electronic communication system; and a reporting interface for Vanderbilt University. These initiatives were integral in the establishment of VUMC’s EMR, which has since been recognized as one of the nation’s top systems. Among many notable achievements, Dr. Jirjis developed and led implementation of the VUMC medical home, which was awarded a 19 million dollar grant by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2012. This initiative aims to improve chronic disease management for patients with high blood pressure, heart failure, and diabetes in addition to lowering costs and improving quality of patient care. In August of 2013, Dr. Jirjis is a graduate of University of Illinois, Champaign (BS, Cum Laude), University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine (MD) and Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Management (MBA). He is board certified in Internal Medicine and finished a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt Medical Center.

Howard Landa did two years of surgical residency 1983-85 at NYU and Bellevue. He trained in Urology at the University of California-San Diego and completed a fellowship in Pediatric Urology at Texas Children’s Hospital. After training Dr. Landa joined the Loma Linda University to practice pediatric urology and during his first year, he built a document management system to help the practice manage transcribed documents and became the Director of Medical Informatics for Loma Linda University Medical Center in 1996. He joined Kaiser Hawaii in 2001 to practice pediatric urology and as one of their physician IT champions, and became their Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) in 2005. He was the physician lead for both Kaiser’s national downtime project and the operating room software; and under his leadership Kaiser Hawaii completed the EHR implementation, attaining HIMSS level 6 two months after inpatient go-live and Level 7 in 2012. In 2009 he became the CMIO of the Alameda County Medical Center. He has been the Program Director and Vice-Chair of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS) since 1997; is the Chair of the HIMSS/AMDIS Physician Community; and was named one of the top 25 Clinical Informatacists in 2010 and 2011.

Maria Michaels is a public health advisor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Office of Public Health Scientific Services – Office of the Director. She currently leads an industry-wide CDC initiative called Adapting Clinical Guidelines for the Digital Age, which aims to apply guidelines in patient care more easily, quickly, accurately, and consistently through a multi-stakeholder developed and refined standardized approach. She is also chair of the CDS Connect Workgroup which informs the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s CDS Connect, a project to demonstrate how evidence-based care can be more rapidly incorporated into clinical practice through interoperable decision support. She brings health IT, healthcare, and research perspectives from her previous roles and a passionate interest in finding ways to break down siloes and use technology to transform data into action in healthcare and public health. She has previously served as Technical Lead / Program Manager for HITECH Clinical Quality Measure Policy and Operations at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and as the Program Manager for the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Human Biobank as well as with the health systems of Virginia Commonwealth University, where she directed the Meaningful Use program across the health system’s hospitals and clinics, and the Johns Hopkins University, where she developed and managed a large research program. She holds a BS in Biology and BS in Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University, MBA from the Johns Hopkins University, and a PMP from the Project Management Institute.

Cheryl Modica is Director of the Quality Center at the National Association of Community Health Centers, Inc. (NACHC).  She has experience in the design, development and operation of innovative health care initiatives at the local and national levels.  Her current work includes the design of an evidence-based framework for health center transformation of infrastructure, people, and delivery systems in support of the Quadruple Aim.  Dr. Modica previously served as Co-Director of the National Association of Community Health Center's Patient Centered Medical Home Institute and Director of the Bureau of Primary Health Care's Patient Visit Redesign Collaborative to dramatically reduce patient visit cycle time by redesigning the medical visit.  While having worked several decades with health centers at the local, state and national levels, she took time during the rollout of the Affordable Care Act to work for a prominent health plan around clinical strategy, quality, and program development. While at the health plan, she was charged with developing the organization’s capability in emerging opportunities brought about by health care reform, including new government programs focused on special populations and health and wellness.  This payer perspective complemented over twenty years of experience in leading health center clinical and quality initiatives.  She has worked as a practice transformation consultant, directing initiatives aimed toward the integration of primary care and public health, translating evidence into practice, national strategy and vision to local execution, and leading change efforts to redefine how to serve customers. Her early clinical experience included nursing positions at Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina Memorial Hospital and a clinic in Agra, India. She has a Masters in Public Health from UNC Chapel Hill and a PhD from New York University's School of Public Service.

Elif Oker, MD, FACEP is Executive Director of IT Digital Strategy & User Experience at Healthcare Service Corporation (HCSC); a parent of five Blue Cross Blue Shield Plans (BCBS). At HCSC, Dr. Oker leads the digital design practice, founded in human centered principles, to support product delivery across all five BCBS plans. A principal in HCSC’s Digital Strategy Advisory Group, she is also responsible for the identification and prioritization of HCSC’s digital capabilities. Dr. Oker, a veteran emergency medicine specialist, has served as assistant professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine. Prior to her current role, Dr. Oker served as medical director for Clinical Strategy & Innovation at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois; one of HCSC’s health plans. As medical director, Dr. Oker worked closely with sales and account management teams to drive population health strategy for key municipal governments and high profile Fortune 500 companies. She also represented BCBSIL on HCSC’s medical policy team; synthesizing scientific & regulator developments and engaging key opinion leaders (Pharma, Device, Tech, Provider) to develop enterprise medical policies to guide coverage positions. An early adopter and digital evangelist, Dr. Oker is routinely tapped as a subject matter expert in digital health serving as a mentor to start-ups at 1871 and MATTER Chicago. A trained media spokesperson and thought leader who has created content and integration strategy for a variety of social media platforms, Dr. Oker has been featured on Bloomberg, Discovery Channel, PBS; presented at Health 2.0, the American Heart Association, HIMSS and served as a delegate to TEDMED. She has also published in medical journals, textbooks and served as a guest lecturer at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, UIC School of Public Health and the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. Oker is a member of the Institute of Medicine Chicago and recently served on the National Quality Forum’s Emergency Department Quality of Transitions of Care expert panel. A graduate of the University of Michigan's combined undergraduate-medical school program (Inteflex), Dr. Oker is fellowship-trained in Toxicology, a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians (FACEP) and Diplomate of the American Board of Emergency Medicine.

Craig W. Robbins has been a family physician with Kaiser Permanente (KP) in Colorado since July 1998. Craig has extensive expertise and experience in critical appraisal of the medical research literature, primary care practice, and implementation of evidence-based recommendations. He was the physician lead for clinical content development during KP Colorado’s implementation of the KP HealthConnect EMR (2003-5). He currently serves as Medical Director, Center for Clinical Information Services & Education at The Permanente Federation and KP Care Management Institute. He oversees the KP National Guideline Program, the KP National Clinical Library, and The Permanente Federation’s Maintenance of Certification Part IV Portfolio Program. Under Craig’s guidance, the KP National Guideline Program updated its guideline development processes in 2011, adopting the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) methodology for developing clinical recommendations. He is an organizational trustee on the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) Board of Trustees. In addition, he is a member of the Planning Curriculum Committee of the LCME candidate, Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, serving as co-lead for both the Health Systems Science curriculum and the Planning Committee for Program Evaluation, Assessment, and Improvement. Craig continues to see patients one day per week in the KP Colorado region as a member of the Primary Care Support Team. He hails from the University of Michigan (BS ’90, MD ’93), the University of Virginia (Residency ’96), and the University of Pittsburgh (MPH ’98). He also completed a Faculty Development Fellowship in Family Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—St Margaret Hospital (’98).

Craig A. Umscheid, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, Vice Chair for Quality and Safety in the Department of Medicine, a practicing hospitalist, and Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Evidence-based Practice (CEP), a center funded by Penn to support patient care quality, safety, and value through evidence-based practice. He is also Medical Director of Clinical Decision Support at Penn, and a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Biomedical Informatics and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. Dr. Umscheid directs the the Critical Appraisal research certificate course and the graduate student Systematic Reviews course at Penn. Outside of Penn, he collaborates with organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assist with guideline development, and serves as the Senior Associate Director of the ECRI Institute - Penn Medicine Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC). He is Chair of the PCORI Advisory Panel on Healthcare Delivery and Disparities Research, an invited member of the AHRQ EPC Methods Steering Committee, a past-member of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MEDCAC), a former Deputy Editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and former Chair of the Society of General Internal Medicine's Evidence-based Medicine Task Force. Dr. Umscheid received his undergraduate degree from Cornell, his medical degree from Georgetown, and a Masters of Science in Clinical Epidemiology from Penn. His post-graduate training includes a Residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Chicago.

Danny, an action catalyst empowering people traveling together toward best health, wears many hats in healthcare: patient with Multiple Sclerosis, care partner for several family members’ end-of-life journeys, a nurse for 40 years, an informaticist and a QI leader. As a patient and caregiver activist, Danny focuses on learning what works for people: informed decision-making, patient-centered research, communication at transitions of care & technology supporting solutions created by and for people. Danny serves on the Steering Committee of AHRQ’s Patient-Centered Clinical Decision Support (PCCDS) Learning Network and as patient expert for CDS Connect. He reviews PCORI research funding applications and serves as co-chair of PCORI’s Clinical Effectiveness and Decision Science (CEDS) Advisory Panel. Danny is active in the Society for Participatory Medicine and is editor of their newsletter. He is a technical expert for the CMS-funded Supporting Efficiency and Innovation in the Process of Developing CMS Quality Measures. Danny blogs weekly (www.health-hats.com) and was recently published in BMJ and JoPM.

Danny has worked clinically in home care, intensive and emergency care, physical rehabilitation, and behavioral health. He held leadership roles in rural and urban health systems, behavioral and community health, and managed care. He led two EHR implementation initiatives and Boston Children’s Hospital’s Patient/Family Experience initiative. Danny plays baritone saxophone.

Andrew M. Wiesenthal has been a Managing Director with Deloitte since May 2010.  From April 2000 until joining Deloitte, he was Associate Executive Director of the Permanente Federation.  There, his work was in the arenas of development and deployment of automated medical records, decision support, and other clinical systems for all of Kaiser Permanente.  Most notably, he was the national physician leader for the Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect (electronic health record) project from its inception through its successful conclusion in 2010.  From 1983 until April 2000, Dr. Wiesenthal served as a pediatrician and pediatric infectious diseases consultant with the Colorado Permanente Medical Group (CPMG). He also led CPMG’s quality management program and served as Associate Medical Director for Medical Management, with responsibility for quality management, utilization management, regulatory compliance, risk management, credentialing and physician performance, and informatics. Since joining Deloitte, he has been a leader on numerous clinical information system projects, as well as health care delivery system strategy and improvement projects.  He is a widely recognized health information technology leader, serving on the Federal Health Information Technology Standards Committee, as co-chair of its Precision Medicine Task Force, and as a member of its Public Health Work Group.  He is also a member of the HL7 Advisory Council. Dr. Wiesenthal graduated from Yale University with a BA degree with honors in Latin American Studies in 1971 and received his MD in 1975 from the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.  He completed his pediatric residency at the University of Colorado in 1978, and then he served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the Centers for Disease Control from 1978-80 before returning to the University of Colorado for a pediatric infectious disease fellowship, which was completed in 1983.  He is board certified in both general pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases.  In 2004, Dr. Wiesenthal earned an SM (Masters of Science) in Health Care Management from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Shafa Al-Showk is a Health Scientist serving as a Program Official in the Division of Health Information Technology (IT) in the Center for Evidence and Practice Improvement (CEPI) at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Shafa is a health educator and a public health professional, her areas of focus include: the aging population, chronic disease management, population health, patient-centered outcomes, and patient education. Currently, she is pursuing a doctoral degree in Public Health with a concentration in Community Health at Walden University.

Prior to joining AHRQ, Shafa was a Public Health Analyst at The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), where she performed data analysis for Health Center Controlled Networks and Cooperative Agreements. She also conducted analyses on Community Health Center data from the Uniform Data System depicting various stages of meaningful use and challenges experienced with Electronic Health Records (EHR).

In the private sector, Shafa played a key role as a clinical manager, in the conceptualization and implementation of an EHR system to ensure effectiveness and efficacy across various arms of the clinical department.

Joshua Richardson, PCCDS Learning Network Assistant Project Director, is a Research Health IT Scientist in RTI International's Program for Digital Health and Clinical Informatics (Chicago, IL) with expertise in evaluating the design, implementation, adoption, use, and effects of health IT among patients, providers, and healthcare organizations. Some of his past work includes identifying the challenges and opportunities to knowledge management of clinical decision support (CDS), detailing provider-centered challenges to using CDS in community-based practices, and laying out health IT needs in patient-centered medical homes. Additional areas of interest include health information exchange, mobile health privacy and security, health care communication, and organizational behavior. Dr. Richardson was a National Library of Medicine Fellow in Biomedical Informatics at Oregon Health & Science University (Portland, OR) where he received both a PhD and MS degree, and in addition, earned a master's degree in library and information science from San Jose State University (San Jose, CA).

Beth Lasater, PCCDS Learning Network Project Manager, has more than 25 years of experience working on numerous health IT and public health projects.  She brings experience working with learning networks and cross site collaborations to improve health and health outcomes.  Ms. Lasater was the project manager for the Practice Transformation Support for Regional Extension Centers for ONC which developed the Practice Transformation Toolkit to assist providers in implementing EHR is practice.  She will provide support for the project and be the point of contact for communications related to the PCCDS LN.

Laura Marcial, PCCDS Learning Network Web and Evaluation Task Lead, is a Health Informaticist in RTI International's Program for Digital Health and Clinical Informatics (DCHI) and is based in Rockville, MD. She serves as an expert in evaluating usability and the implementation, adoption, use, and effects of health IT among relevant stakeholders in a variety of settings. Dr. Marcial’s foundational work has been in the areas of mobile usability and scientific data repositories. Dr. Marcial received her PhD degree in Library and Information Science in 2012 from the University of North Carolina.