Advisory Council

Joyce Sensmeier MS, RN-BC, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, FAAN is Vice President of Informatics for HIMSS, the largest U.S. not-for-profit, cause-based association focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of information technology for the betterment of healthcare.

In her current role she is responsible for the areas of clinical informatics, standards, interoperability, privacy and security. Sensmeier became Board Certified in Nursing Informatics in 1996, earned the Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems in 2002, and achieved HIMSS fellowship status in 2005.  

Sensmeier has made contributions to enabling health information exchange through standards profiling and harmonization initiatives. She led advancement of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), an international standards organization which, over the past decade, has achieved both regional and international adoption of its public domain technical framework. Sensmeier is president of IHE USA, and previously served as the Standards Implementation Technical Manager for the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).

An internationally recognized speaker and author of multiple book chapters, articles and white papers, Sensmeier was recognized in 2010 as a fellow with the American Academy of Nursing, the highest honor in the field of nursing. She is also co-founder and ex-officio chair of the Alliance for Nursing Informatics, a global collaboration of 30 distinct nursing informatics groups that represents a unified voice for nursing informatics professionals.

Phil Burstein is Vice President, Healthcare Data Optimization, Medicines Development, R&D at GlaxoSmithKline in R&D. He leads a very talented team dedicated to fully utilizing clinical trial data and observational data in drug discovery and development. Before joining R&D in 1999 he spent a year in the former SmithKline Beecham HealthCare Services Department developing disease management tools for managed care markets.

Phil received an AB from Princeton University before attending medical school at the Medical College of Virginia. Following a three year internal medicine residency at MCV he spent two years in the Air Force as an internist and flight surgeon. After completing an Endocrinology Fellowship at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, he practiced Endocrinology for ten years and spent another ten years in hospital administration before joining SB in 1998.

Dr. Chute received his undergraduate and medical training at Brown University, internal medicine residency at Dartmouth, and doctoral training in Epidemiology at Harvard. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Epidemiology, and the American College of Medical Informatics. He became founding Chair of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo in 1988, stepping down after 20 years in that role.

He is now Professor of Medical Informatics, and is PI on a large portfolio of research including the HHS/Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) SHARP (Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects) on Secondary EHR Data Use, the ONC Beacon Community (Co-PI), the LexGrid projects, Mayo's CTSA Informatics, Mayo's Cancer Center Informatics including caBIG, and several NIH grants including one of the eMERGE centers from NGHRI, which focus upon genome wide association studies against shared phenotypes derived from electronic medical records.

Dr. Chute serves as Vice Chair of the Mayo Clinic Data Governance for Health Information Technology Standards, and on Mayo's enterprise IT Oversight Committee. He is presently Chair, ISO Health Informatics Technical Committee (ISO TC215) and Chairs the World Health Organization (WHO) ICD-11 Revision. He also served on strategic advisory panels to NCRR and NHGRI within NIH, and the Health Information Technology Standards Committee for the Office of the National Coordinator in the US DHHS. Recently held positions include Chair of the Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics study section at NIH, Chair of the Board of the HL7/FDA/NCI/CDISC BRIDG project, on the Board of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), ANSI Health Information Standards Technology Panel (HITSP) Board member, Chair of the US delegation to ISO TC215 for Health Informatics, Convener of Healthcare Concept Representation WG3 within the (TC215), Co-chair of the HL7 Vocabulary Committee, Chair of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) WG6 on Medical Concept Representation, American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Board member, and multiple other NIH biomedical informatics study sections as chair or member.

Rick Cnossen serves as the worldwide director for Intel's Health IT Program Office where hee is responsible for Intel's Health IT strategy and product enabling. He is also past president for the Continua Health Alliance where he continues to serve on the Boardand is a member of the HL7 Board Advisory Council.

Additionally, Mr. Cnossen served on the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) Board of Directors and is a participating member of the ISO/IEEE 11073 Personal Health Data Work Group (WG), the Health Level Seven (HL7) Structured Document Technical Committee, the USB Personal Health Device WG, the WiFi Alliance Healthcare WG, and the Bluetooth Medical Device WG.

Mr. Cnossen holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC). He worked at McDonnell Douglas (Boeing) for 15 years as a software engineering manager and at Intel for 12 years as an engineer manager and director. He has been involved in product development for medical devices, telco modular servers, tactical defense data collection and analysis, hierarchical data assimilation and storage, and high performance computing.

Dr. Dente's started his informatics career over 18 years ago after graduating Boston University School of Medicine, focusing on new approaches to increase patient safety, drive physician adoption of technology, and create new methods to implement evidence-based medicine.

Prior to joining GE Healthcare Dr. Dente served as President of MBS Service Inc, a consulting company providing international executive healthcare management services. Earlier in his career, he served as Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Wang Healthcare Information Systems, and led that company's design of an ambulatory electronic medical record.

As Chief Medical Informatics Officer for GE Healthcare Information Technology, his global responsibilities include: Applying domain expertise in informatics to drive Comparative Effectiveness Research, strategic evaluation of emerging technologies for the healthcare portfolio, as well as developing and delivering GE's clinical informatics research direction & messaging globally. Additional responsibilities include; clinical liaison for GE's standards based Interoperability Strategies, Knowledge Management / Evidence Based Medicine, and secondary use of Clinical Data programs

As a physician executive, Dr. Dente continues to maintain close academic, government and industry contacts as well as drive GE's "Early Health - Personalized Medicine" initiative at the national and international level.

Carl Dvorak oversees software development, training, and customer support, as well as general corporate management at Epic. He also works closely with organizations implementing Epic's software.

Before joining the Office of the Director, Dr. Fitzmaurice was Director, Center for Information Technology, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research until March 1998. He joined the Public Health Service in 1987 as Director of the National Center for Health Services Research and Health Care Technology Assessment, coming from the Health Care Financing Administration where he was Acting Director, Office of Research. Previously, as branch chief in the Office of Research, he directed the development of Medicare's Prospective Payment System. Dr. Fitzmaurice received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1972 from the University of Maryland. He has separate undergraduate degrees from St. Joseph's College (Rensselaer, IN) in Mathematics and in Economics. He was an adjunct Associate Professor in the Howard University Graduate School of Business, 1972-77, and the University College Graduate School, University of Maryland at College Park, 1982-87.

He is active nationally and internationally in encouraging the uniformity and computerization of health care information to improve the quality of patient care and public health policy decisions. In 2000, he received the Elmer Gabrielli Award from the American Society for Testing and Materials, Committee E31, for his dedication to and achievements in national health data standards. In 1999, he received the Future of Health Technology Award, and was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

In 1993, he served on the White House Health Reform Task Force (Information Systems and Administrative Simplification Working Groups). The White House Information Infrastructure Task Force released his paper "Health Care and the National Information Infrastructure (NII)" in Putting the Information Infrastructure to Work (May 1994) that presents the vision of how the NII can benefit the health care sector. From 1996 to 2000, he co-chaired the HHS Information and Cross-cutting Implementation Team that provided oversight for developing the health data standards requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L. 104-191). He was an active member of the HHS Privacy Working Group that produced the HIPAA Privacy Rule. He was lead staff to the NCVHS Computerized Patient Record Working Group that produced the congressionally mandated report on standards needed for patient medical record information and its electronic transmission. This report was sent to the Secretary of HHS on July 6, 2000, and is available at http://ncvhs.hhs.gov/hipaa000706.pdf

Currently, Dr. Fitzmaurice advises the Director of AHRQ on developing health information technology research programs, and represents AHRQ on the White House Networking Information Technology Research and Demonstrations Program and on the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS). From 2001-04, Dr. Fitzmaurice was lead staff on the HHS Secretary's Council on Private Sector Initiatives to Improve the Security, Safety, and Quality of Health Care. Dr. Fitzmaurice was also a member of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) RFI Response Review Team that in 2005 reviewed and prepared summaries of the 500 public responses. http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hipaa1.htm. He initiated and managed AHRQ's Data Standards Program, with an annual budget of $10 million in 2004, 2005, and 2006. He is a member of the American Medical Association's Ethical Force Oversight Body.

Dr. Fitzmaurice, with Karen Adams and John Eisenberg, published AThree Decades of Research on Computer Applications in Health Care: Medical Informatics Support at the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2002;9:144-160. With Stephen Wagner, he co-authored ACritical Standards Convergence@ in Person-Centered Health Records: Toward HealthePeople, eds.:Demetriades, Kolodner, Christopherson. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, Inc., 2005. His chapter, "Computer-Based Patient Records," was published in The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, Third Edition. Boco Raton, FL, 2006.

Nick Hilger is the Business Development Partner with JDA eHealth Systems, a SaaS Revenue Cycle Middleware provider to Hospitals and Physicians. JDA offers a comprehensive suite of applications for upstream, midstream, and downstream Revenue Cycle operations. Hilger spent the majority of his professional life as the CEO of Health Systems in Minnesota (HealthEast), Colorado (HealthOne), and Illinois (Columbia/HCA). Following his Health System experiences he helped launch several start-up health ventures and consulted with major Health Systems in the area of Hospital / Physician partnerships and joint ventures. Immediately prior to joining JDA he was a senior executive at United Health Group working in strategic outreach to Health Systems.

Nina M. Schwenk, M.D., is a consultant in Area General Internal Medicine at Mayo Clinic. She is Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Mayo Medical School and past chair of the Division of Area General Internal Medicine. Dr. Schwenk is Vice-President of the Mayo Clinic Board of Trustees and Chair of the Mayo Clinic Information Technology Committee.

Dr. Schwenk received her undergraduate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated from medical school at McGill University in Montreal Canada. She completed residency and fellowship training in internal medicine at Mayo Clinic.

Dr. Schwenk is active in professional and academic societies at both the local and national levels.

Joyce Sensmeier MS, RN-BC, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, FAAN is Vice President of Informatics for HIMSS, the largest U.S. not-for-profit, cause-based association focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of information technology for the betterment of healthcare.

In her current role she is responsible for the areas of clinical informatics, standards, interoperability, privacy and security. Sensmeier became Board Certified in Nursing Informatics in 1996, earned the Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems in 2002, and achieved HIMSS fellowship status in 2005.  

Sensmeier has made contributions to enabling health information exchange through standards profiling and harmonization initiatives. She led advancement of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), an international standards organization which, over the past decade, has achieved both regional and international adoption of its public domain technical framework. Sensmeier is president of IHE USA, and previously served as the Standards Implementation Technical Manager for the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).

An internationally recognized speaker and author of multiple book chapters, articles and white papers, Sensmeier was recognized in 2010 as a fellow with the American Academy of Nursing, the highest honor in the field of nursing. She is also co-founder and ex-officio chair of the Alliance for Nursing Informatics, a global collaboration of 30 distinct nursing informatics groups that represents a unified voice for nursing informatics professionals.

Dr. Suarez is a physician and a public health and medical information systems specialist, and the Director of Health IT Strategy for Kaiser Permanente.  Before joining Kaiser, Dr. Suarez was the President and CEO of the Institute for HIPAA/HIT Education and Research. Prior to this he was the CEO of the Midwest Center for HIPAA Education and before that the Executive Director and CEO of the Minnesota Health Data Institute.  He also worked for the Minnesota Department of Health in various senior policy positions.

Dr. Suarez has provided project management, technical and policy consulting services and project/program evaluation services to health care provider organizations, health plans, Medicaid and Medicare programs, Public Health agencies and vendors in the areas of Health IT/HIE, public health data standards, health disparities, quality measurement, health information privacy and security standards, and HIPAA standards including Transactions and Code Sets (TCS) and the National Provider Identifier (NPI). In the past 10 years Dr. Suarez delivered over 200 one-day and two-day educational programs and training seminars for health care providers, public health professionals, and other health care organizations.  He has also developed and published nationally recognized toolkits for planning and implementing HIPAA Privacy and Security across an enterprise and authored a number of industry papers on a variety of HIPAA, Health IT and HIE topics.

He is a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), where he co-chairs the Sub-Committee on Standards.  He is also a member of HIT Standards Committee of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where he co-chairs the Privacy and Security Workgroup. Dr. Suarez is also an active member of several national and international organizations, including Founding President and Member of the Board of Directors of the Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC);  Member of the Executive Board of the Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force (JPHITF); and Member of HL7, X12 and ISO.

Dr. Suarez has been the recipient of numerous regional and national awards, including the Minnesota Physician’s “Most Influential Health Care Leaders” in 1997 and 1998, the WEDI 2004, 2006 and 2007 Distinguished Service Award and the first recipient of WEDI’s prestigious “Andrew H. Melczer” Excellence in Volunteerism Award, in 2005.

Jeremy Thorp is the Director of Business Requirements in the Technology Office of NHS Connecting for Health. In this role he is responsible for the Business Architecture of the National Programme for IT in England, liaising closely with the Department of Health on policy and strategy issues. He is also the business lead within NHS Connecting for Health for the Secondary Uses Service (SUS) programme, supporting reporting and analysis of Care Record information.

Jeremy has previously worked at national, regional and local levels in the

NHS:

• Nationally in the Department of Health Information Policy Unit and in the NHS Information Authority
• Regionally in the South and West region, and
• Locally in the Bristol area where he still lives.

Dr. John Tooker is the Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the American College of Physicians (ACP). ACP is the largest medical specialty society in the U.S., representing 124,000 specialists in internal medicine (internists), internal medicine subspecialists, and medical students.

ACP's mission is to enhance the quality and effectiveness of health care by fostering excellence and professionalism in the practice of medicine. Reinforced by the strength of its membership and guided by a strong policy portfolio, ACP is leading efforts to unify the internal medicine community, develop new models of patient care and delivery, and implement fundamental and comprehensive reforms to repair a dysfunctional payment system to make internal medicine more attractive as a career choice.

Dr. Tooker serves on the boards of the National Quality Forum, eHealth Initiative, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (Chair-Elect, 2008), the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, the Electronic Health Record Patient Safety Advisory Board, and the Council of Medical Specialty Societies. He also represents ACP as a founding member of the AQA, formerly the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance and serves on the Connecting for Health steering committee.

Prior to joining ACP in 1995 as Deputy EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Tooker was Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine and Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine, where he practiced internal medicine and pulmonary and critical care medicine.

Dr. Tooker earned his MD at University of Colorado School of Medicine, his native state, completed his internal medicine residency at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York and the University of Colorado, and his pulmonary and critical care fellowship at the Maine Medical Center and the University of Washington. He is a graduate of the Fox School of Business at Temple University, and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Charlene Underwood is director of Government and Industry Affairs for Siemens Medical Solutions.

A nationally recognized expert in the field of healthcare informatics, Underwood directs Siemens outreach and advocacy activities in emerging market initiatives, specifically those related to government activities in healthcare information technology (HIT) including: the U.S. Government's activities on HIT; regional healthcare information organizations (RHIO); community connectivity; HIT standards across the healthcare industry; interoperability; transitions of care; Electronic Health Record (EHR) strategies; quality initiatives; pay for performance; and grants and government funding.

She is a leader is delivering Siemens solutions message to key stakeholders throughout the healthcare industry and on Capitol Hill, while developing programs that enable Siemens leadership in key government and industry initiatives. She provides valuable input and direction to healthcare and government leaders on the power of HIT to transform healthcare through her leadership in high-profile industry organizations, including her role as Chair of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) Electronic Health Record Vendor Association.

Underwood has a long history of researching, managing, and implementing all aspects of HIT, both within the U.S. and globally. This experience has qualified her to set strategic direction for Siemens EHR solutions, as well as participate in outreach efforts to impact the direction of the industry. She has actively advocated for industry involvement and has held leadership roles in influential organizations including HL7, in which she participated in defining the organization's EHR functional standards and model; the Computerized Patient Record Institute (CPRI), which awards the Nicholas E. Davies award for excellence in EHR implementation - of which she was a founding committee member.

A 32-year employee of Siemens Medical Solutions HIT division, she has participated in defining business strategies and requirements for many of its clinical solutions, including INVISION®, the healthcare industry's most widely installed HIT system, and Soarian®, the only healthcare information solution built to streamline healthcare processes through workflow engine technology.

Underwood is a Phi Beta Kappa from Purdue University with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. She earned an MBA in marketing from Temple University.

A native of West Chester, Pennsylvania, she is married with 3 children and enjoys fitness activities, gardening, travel, and community outreach.