Wiesenthal, eight others appointed to standards commitee

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has named Dr. Andrew Wiesenthal, director of healthcare practice, Deloitte Consulting, San Francisco, and eight others to the federally chartered Health IT Standards Committee, according to an announcement posted on HHS' website.

The standards committee was created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to advise the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on health IT standards and other technical issues.

Before joining Deloitte, Wiesenthal served more than 28 years within the Kaiser Permanente healthcare organization, including more than 10 years as associate executive director, clinical information support, helping lead the organization in the adoption of a unified electronic health-record system across the entire integrated delivery system.  

Wiesenthal also served on the board of directors of SNOMED International, the developer of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms, or SNOMED CT, a clinical coding system, and on the management board of the Copenhagen, Denmark-based International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization, which now serves as keeper of the SNOMED code.

Joining Wiesenthal for the first time on the standards committee are Lisa Gallagher, director of privacy and security for the Healthcare and Information Management Systems Society, which is hosting its annual convention this week in New Orleans; Jeremy Delinsky, senior vice president and chief technology officer and electronic health record and practice management systems developer, Athenahealth; Keith Figlioli, senior vice president of healthcare informatics, Premier Inc.; Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, director of the division of informatics solutions and operations at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Dr. Anne LeMaistre, senior director clinical information systems and chief medical information officer, Seton Healthcare Family, Ascension Health, Austin, Texas; Kim Nolen, medical outcomes specialist, Pfizer.; and Dr. Eric Rose, director of clinical terminology, Intelligent Medical Objects, Seattle.

Wiesenthal has advocated wider adoption of the Convergent Medical Terminology, or CMT, an "interface language" that Kaiser Permanente developed and donated to the IHTSDO, and which Kaiser cross-mapped to SNOMED. Wiesenthal said CMT could serve as a possible alternative to compelling physicians and other clinicians to directly use the proposed International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision of diagnostic and procedural codes. HHS has mandated the nationwide adoption of ICD-10 by Oct. 1, 2014, but the American Medical Association and other groups have pushed back against that deadline.