On January 31, 2020 the PCCDS Learning Network, an AHRQ-funded initiative, was ended. This website is no longer being maintained. Many of the activities and materials developed by the PCCDS Learning Network are still freely available on this website.
The PCCDS Learning Network is led by a team of core administrative staff from RTI International and Blackford Middleton, MD, MPH, MSc, Jerome Osheroff, MD, and Kensaku Kawamoto, MD, PhD, serve as key investigators.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
