Lisa Bari has left the CMS' Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation where she spent more than three years working on interagency health IT, interoperability and artificial intelligence issues.
Bari will now work on health IT and value-based care issues as an independent consultant and said she hopes to still support primary care's adoption of technology.
"I never expected to stay at CMS for as long as I did ... I stayed because I was working on some huge, really important and exciting projects," Bari said.
Bari recently worked on proposed interoperability and patient access rules from the CMS and HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
She said that she could have stayed at the CMS to see the implementation of the proposed rules, but companies that want to implement value-based care were interested in her background.
Bari recently said that she believes interoperability is the "fuel" for value-based care and that she's thinking of how to help change a culture that prevents patients from accessing their health data in a format they choose.
"This is a moment where regulators and lawmakers need to decide if the current state of play is acceptable," she said.
It remains to be seen whether regulators and lawmakers will push back against the business and cultural norms that led to a lack of interoperability and patient access to data, she said. Bari added that it's critical to resist "known information blockers" such as large EHRs and provider systems.
Bari also led the design and implementation of the CMS Artificial Intelligence Health Outcomes Challenge, a $1.65 million prize competition designed to drive the development of AI-based solutions to predict health outcomes for the Medicare population using CMS data.
She recently expressed support for new application programming interface projects from the CMS, including Data at the Point of Care, which uses Medicare claims data to fill in gaps in a patient's medical history and the Beneficiaries Claims Data API, which allows Shared Savings Program ACOs to retrieve bulk Medicare claims data for beneficiaries that are assigned to them.
