A trio of healthcare information technology experts that includes a vice president of IT from Kaiser Permanente and a senior editor for the Mayo Clinic's website will advise HHS on standards for sharing patient medical information.
James “Jamie” Ferguson, vice president of HIT Strategy and Policy at Kaiser; Carolyn Petersen, senior editor for Mayoclinic.org; and Karen van Caulil, president and CEO of the Florida Health Care Coalition, a business coalition on health, will sit on the federally chartered HIT Policy Committee.
Ferguson is an expert in healthcare IT standards development and has been a member of the HIT Standards Committee, a sister advisory panel to the HIPC, since its inception in 2009.
He also serves on the standards organizations Health Level Seven International and the International Organization for Standardization. Ferguson replaces Dr. Charles Kennedy, vice president for HIT at WellPoint, as a health plan representative on the panel.
Peterson, a 30-year cancer survivor, is a member of the ethics committee of the American Medical Informatics Association and has served as a consumer representative of the Food and Drug Administration's anesthesiology and respiratory therapy devices panel and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute's improving healthcare systems advisory panel.
She replaces Alicia Staley, a member of the Tufts Medical Center Board of Governors, as a consumer representative on the HITPC.
Van Caulil is board chairwoman of the National Business Coalition on Health. She serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Central Florida's College of Health and Public Affairs/Department of Health Management and Informatics. She replaces David Lansky, CEO of the Pacific Business Group on Health, as employer representative on the panel.
U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro appointed them as he is able to choose 13 of the HIT Policy Committee's 20 members.
The HITPC meets monthly and is chaired by the head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS.
At their most recent meeting in April, the two federal advisory committees discussed progress in the development and use of application programming interfaces to enhance interoperability of healthcare computer systems. They also received a privacy and security update from ONC's chief privacy officer, Lucia Savage.