Health IT Summit in Beverly Hills
November 6-7, 2013
The Sofitel

Chuck Deckert, Vice President, Health Information Technology Solutions, Sharp Community Medical Group

Chuck is the Vice-President of Health Information Technology Solutions for Sharp Community Medical Group (SCMG), an independent practice association of over 700 multi-specialty physicians-one of two Sharp-affiliated medical groups. Chuck's role is to lead SCMG's IS/IT strategy and execution. He has over 15 years' experience in a variety of roles in the realm of Electronic Health Record system implementation--as a vendor and customer--and in both Ambulatory and Acute Care settings.

Elise Dempsey, Vice President, Clinical Informatics, Dignity Health

Elise Dempsey’s healthcare experience spans nearly 31 years as both a clinician and expert in development, management, and outcomes of patient care delivery systems. With a doctorate in Nursing, Dempsey is a nationally recognized speaker and author in the areas of strategic planning of clinical information systems and a variety of critical care topics, including use of outcome data for process improvement in critical care, and physician adoption of clinical information technology. In 1988, Dempsey joined CHW’s Dominican Hospital, previously serving as cardiovascular clinical specialist, Critical Care Services department manager, clinical outcomes manager, cardiovascular service manager and nurse informaticist.

Guillermo Diaz Jr., MD, CPHIMS, Chief Medical Information Officer, Ambulatory Care Network, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services

Guillermo Diaz MD attended medical school at the UCLA School of Medicine. After completing his pediatrics residency at Harbor – UCLA Medical Center, Dr. Diaz joined QueensCare Family Clinics, a Federally Qualified Health Center, as their Assistant Chief Medical Officer and soon found his passion as their Chief Medical Information Officer. Dr. Diaz’s special interests include using Health Information Technology as a tool to improve patient care. His favorite project to date has been the successful implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) in all QueensCare Family Clinics sites. He enjoyed it so much so that he has recently moved on to become the Chief Medical Information Officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services – Ambulatory Care Network and is helping to guide the implementation of another EHR. Dr. Diaz currently sits as chair for the Los Angeles Regional Extension Center's Physician Advisory Council. Dr. Diaz envisions a healthcare environment where providers have a comprehensive patient record at their fingertips to provide the most efficient and highest quality care possible.

Lawrence Friedman, MD, Medical Director, Ambulatory Care, Quality, and Safety, UC San Diego Health System, Founder, UC San Diego Telemedicine Learning Center

Lawrence Friedman, M.D., is Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego). His main responsibilities include Medical Directorship of the large faculty practice and oversight of ambulatory quality and safety, managed care, ambulatory clinical practices including primary care and specialty services. Much of his time is spent working with physician and administrative leadership to assure that UC San Diego meets or exceeds the highest clinical care standards and provides the best possible patient experience. For the fourth year in a row, he has led UC San Diego to be recognized as one of the “top performers” on clinical quality measures among all California medical groups.

Dr. Friedman is also the founder of the UC San Diego Telemedicine Learning Center and Telemedicine Clinical Programs which provide specialty consultation statewide and internationally. In recent years, Dr. Friedman has been Co-Chair of the University Health System Consortium Ambulatory Care Steering Committee; served as a member of the Pay for Performance Implementation Advisory Task Force at the National Quality Forum; and is currently a member of the Agency for Health Care Research Study Section on Health Care Technology and Decision Science. Before assuming full time administrative responsibilities, Dr. Friedman had been the Division Chief for General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at UC San Diego. He has authored over fifty publications including original research, book chapters, review articles, monographs, and medical society position statements. He is currently a reviewer for several peer-reviewed medical journals.

Prior to arriving at UC San Diego in 1994, Dr. Friedman had been the acting Division Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Deaconess Hospital in Boston and a member of the faculty in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He earned his medical degree at Georgetown University and completed internship and residency training at the Deaconess Hospital in Boston, followed by a General Medicine fellowship at Harvard Medical School.

Justin Graham, MD, MS, CMIO, NorthBay Healthcare

Justin Graham is a physician executive with over 15 years of experience in quality improvement, medical informatics, information technology, performance improvement, and clinical operations.

Dr. Graham currently serves as Chief Medical Information Officer for NorthBay Healthcare in Fairfield, California. He is the clinical leader for all initiatives related to clinical information systems in use at NorthBay’s hospitals and outpatient clinics. His current focus is optimizing NorthBay’s electronic health record system, including computerized provider order entry and electronic documentation, to improve the quality of patient care and organizational efficiency.

Previously, Dr. Graham was Chief Medical Information Officer for the California Prison Healthcare Receivership, which managed an integrated delivery network encompassing 33 California facilities; Medical Director for Quality and Informatics at Lumetra, California’s Quality Improvement Organization; and lead physician content designer for Kaiser Permanente’s national implementation of an inpatient EHR. Dr. Graham has also worked as a consultant in strategy and operations of healthcare information technology independently, and on behalf of Deloitte Consulting and Dearborn Advisors.

Dr. Graham is board certified in Infectious Diseases and holds a Master’s Degree in Biomedical Informatics. He trained at UC San Francisco, Harvard University and Stanford University. He serves on the Board of Directors of the AHIMA Foundation and the Advisory Board of the Institute for Health Technology Transformation. Dr. Graham founded the Bay Area Medical Informatics Society. He mentors healthcare IT startups through incubators including Blueprint Health and continues to practice medicine as an infectious disease expert at NorthBay and as Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF.

Rodney M. Hamilton, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Informatics Corporation of America, Inc.

Dr. Hamilton is the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) for Informatics Corporation of America (ICA). He provides clinical leadership and support to numerous departments of ICA including Product Development, Client Services, Sales and Business Development, and Marketing. Prior to joining ICA in 2012, he was the CMIO and Managing Director of the Product Strategy practice for PointClear Solutions, Inc., a technology consulting firm dedicated to developing highly usable and impactful healthcare solutions. In that role, he consulted with a wide variety of healthcare clients including new and existing HIT vendors, provider organizations, and payers.

Prior to joining PointClear, Dr. Hamilton was the Corporate Director of Medical Informatics for Vanguard Health Systems, a 26-hospital investor-owned health system based in Nashville, TN. His responsibilities included the creation of the overall clinical information systems strategy for the inpatient and outpatient settings, the development of Vanguard’s health information exchange strategy and the development of tools and processes for developing and managing clinical content and clinical decision support. Before joining Vanguard in 2007, Dr. Hamilton held a number of positions within McKesson’s information technology division. His work focused primarily on the product development, implementation, and product management activities related to McKesson’s CPOE solution.

Dr. Hamilton continues to practice pediatrics part-time within a practice he co-founded in late 2006. He is an active user and administrator of an ambulatory EHR in that setting, and he remains an active member of the clinical faculty of Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

Dr. Hamilton received his Doctorate in Medicine degree from the University of Tennessee – Memphis College of Medicine and completed his residency in Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. During his residency program, he also worked extensively with Vanderbilt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics on a number of clinical systems projects. He has been a member of the American Medical Informatics Association since 2001. Additionally, he has been a member of the Health Informatics Taskforce of the Federation of American Hospitals and the National Quality Forum’s Clinical Decision Support Technical Expert Panel.

Richard Hutsell, VP & Chief Information Officer, Daughters of Charity Health System

Mr. Hutsell’s professional healthcare and technology career began 30 years ago with the Consulting Division of Arthur Andersen (now Accenture). He was part of the development team of an early budgeting and decision support system, had extensive experience with first generation clinical systems and moving hospitals from shared to in-house technologies.

During the development of the Daughters of Charity Health System, Mr. Hutsell established the initial strategy for Quality Improvement and developed work groups for marketing, nursing, supply chain management, imaging and other ancillary support areas. Currently, he has responsibility for Pharmacy Management in addition to traditional CIO duties.

Mr. Hutsell graduated from the University of Washington where his graduate school emphasis was accounting.

Katherine Kim, MPH, MBA, Professor in Residence, San Francisco State University, Health Equity Institute

Katherine Kim is Professor in Residence at San Francisco State University’s Health Equity Institute. Her research focuses on the role of technology in consumer/patient engagement in health and the associated policy issues, particularly in the areas of mobile health, distributed electronic research networks, and health information exchange. She is a member of the Consumer Empowerment Workgroup of the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) HIT Policy Committee. And, she is currently PI on two research grants and an advisor to three other research projects in this area.

Ms. Kim has over 20 years of experience with hospitals and medical groups, as an entrepreneur--CEO of a venture-funded startup, leader of a business incubator, and Founder and President of Kim Consultants—and in software product development with Oracle. Ms. Kim received a BA in Biology from Harvard, MPH and MBA from UC Berkeley, and is a PhD candidate at University of California Davis, Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Kirk Larson, VP & CIO, Children's Hospital Central California

Kirk Larson joined Children’s Hospital Central California in November 2010 as vice president and chief information officer. Larson came to Children’s from Natividad Medical Center – a county-owned public safety net hospital – in Salinas, Calif., where he served as chief information officer.

With nearly a decade of management experience, Larson brings a wealth of knowledge to Children’s. He has held a variety of leadership positions over the years, including senior managing consultant, healthcare consulting, and senior manager, service and support, for Cerner Corporation, a leader in the healthcare information systems industry and the largest healthcare consultancy in the world, in Kansas City, Mo.

Larson is a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. He especially enjoys mentoring and helping others. He served as a facilitator/trainer for newly promoted managers, team leads and emerging leaders at Cerner Corporation, and received the Sequoia Award for outstanding mentoring from Arthur Andersen, LLP, where he worked as a senior consultant, advanced technology group, in Chicago, Ill. In addition, he volunteered as a counselor for gifted youth students at Purdue University for 16 consecutive summers in West Lafayette, Ind.

Larson earned his bachelor of science degree in mathematics magna cum laude from North Central College in Naperville, Ill. He received dual degrees in master of health services administration (MHSA), health management and policy, and master of business administration (MBA), finance and corporate strategy, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Larson completed his MBA internship as a health business associate at Medco Health Solutions, the nation’s largest pharmacy benefits manager, in Franklin Lakes, N.J. He did his MHSA internship as a hospital administrative resident at NorthShore University HealthSystem, a nationally recognized “Top 100 Hospital” and “Top 15 Teaching Hospital” in Evanston, Ill.

Scott Mace, Senior Technology Editor, HealthLeaders Media

Scott Mace is senior technology editor at HealthLeaders Media, read in print by 40,000 healthcare executives throughout the United States, and online by more than 200,000 readers. Previously, he wrote and organized Internet-related conferences for Penton Media. Before a stint at Byte Magazine, he was a senior editor at InfoWorld, ran the networking test center team, served as Washington D.C. bureau chief, covered database management and education beats, and wrote the first weekly column on computer games. He also wrote features for NurseWeek, as well as columns for Boardwatch, Personal Computing, and inCider. He lives in Alameda, California, where he also writes the Scott Mace on Healthcare and Calendar Swamp weblogs and serves on the board of directors of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium.

John Mattison, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente

John began his medical career at UC San Diego and Scripps Clinic, where he practiced in many clinical settings including primary care, critical care, preventive medicine, hyperbaric medicine, trauma and helicopter medicine, and held several directorships while at Scripps Clinic, including Quality, Utilization, and Critical Care. He joined Kaiser Permanente in 1989, and was appointed as Assistant Medical Director and Chief Medical Information Officer in 1992.

John’s interest in systems design began as a marine biologist when he created several software applications to model population behavior. He wrote his first electronic health record in 1984 and used fully automated medical records in his practice until the time he began a fulltime commitment to healthcare informatics. He has built, designed, or implemented seven different EHR systems, most recently KP HealthConnect. His team helped build and deploy the first highly scalable version of this system, which today stands as the largest private sector implementation of an EHR in the US. John was director of the largest regional deployment, encompassing 5,000 physicians, 140 clinics, 13 hospitals, and 2.3million members, but he is quick to identify his many colleagues within KP who have provided the support, the resources and the skills necessary for such a monumental achievement.

He has actively shaped a culture of extremely rapid issue escalation and resolution that became the single most critical success factor for this large scale and pioneering project. He was also one of the founding members of the IMIA Workgroup on Organizational Aspects of Informatics, which focuses on the cultural change management required to successfully transform cultures with new technology. His team included many world class project managers who completed the project more than a year ahead of schedule and nearly $100million under budget. KP has been recognized as the uncontested leader for both outpatient and inpatient systems, leading the country for hospitals awarded with the top HIMSS level 7 designation. In 2011, 6 of the hospitals in SCAL region, and 12 KP hospitals nationally were recognized among the top 118 “Most Connected Hospitals” by US News and World Report. KPHC also includes the largest and most active use of Personal Health Records (PHRs) in the nation. With over 60% of our eligible members using the PHR portal, we exchange over 25,000 secure emails daily with our patients. Whether it’s US News & World Report, JD Powers, or National Council on Quality Assurance, Kaiser Permanente tops nearly every third party assessment for quality of care.

John has co-chaired the National KP IT Infrastructure Governance for the past four years, and he also chaired the Inter-Regional Business Governance Group since its inception. In addition, he chairs the national governance oversight of Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Data Center Strategy. He continues his active participation on National HIT Strategy, Security Council, Care Delivery, and Risk Management.

John has been intimately engaged in the development and deployment of international interoperability standards. He founded an independent Standards Development Organization (SDO) to introduce XML into Healthcare, and later brought that SDO and that work into HL7. He chaired the XML committee at HL7 for the first three years, and that group has generated the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and the Continuity of Care Document (CCD). Hundreds of extremely talented individuals have continued that work since he initiated it within HL7, and it is now recognized as the international standard for exchanging medical records between different EHR and PHR systems.

He has directed the KP team in the National Health Information Network project between KP, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense, which began production exchange of documents in San Diego in late 2009, not coincidentally in the same geography where he and his co-founder Dr. Spinosa initiated the CDA. He is an active member of the National Health Information Network Coordinating Committee (NW-HIN CC), which governs the use of national health information exchange, and has also joined the team that is drafting legislation for rule-making underway for a permanent NW-HIN Governance structure. He has recently joined the advisory board for the $15M Beacon project for Regional Health Information Exchange through UC San Diego.

John also was the first clinician to join the SNOMED International Board and helped guide that medical international medical terminology standard for six years.

He has a strong commitment to ensuring that security policies and practices effectively protect patient privacy and has been an active participant in various state and national initiatives in this arena. Most recently, he has been appointed to both the Policy Task Force for Cal eConnect, and the Privacy Steering Committee for the California State efforts to build a statewide health information exchange.

He is a founding member of the KP Innovation Fund and Board of Directors, and reviews every innovation proposal for the national program. He has sponsored numerous innovation projects including direct text messaging to patients, Smartphone applications for healthcare consumers, Natural Language Processing for data mining, medication management tools using smartphones, and advanced decision support, among others.

He has published numerous papers in medical informatics and has delivered national and international presentations on various topics on Innovation in Healthcare, Consumer-directed Healthcare, Mobile Healthcare, Clinical Ontologies and Medical Informatics. His most recent grant participation includes the establishment of a cross-institutional mechanism for research (SCANNER) that respects the local privacy policies at each institution. Recent speaker engagements include keynote addresses at 2nd mHealth Networking Conference, 2010 San Diego, the CIO Conference 2010 in Scottsdale, HealthTech 2011 in San Francisco, CIO Forum at HIMSS 2011 in Orlando, Canadian Health Information Exchange Summit 2011, Toronto, and others.

John and his team have hosted dozens of delegations from around the world who are interested in how they have automated every aspect of care, throughout every clinic and hospital in the Southern California region. He presented at a 3 day course on Care Delivery Strategies given entirely in Spanish to a delegation from Catalonia. He has consulted internationally on Health Information Technology, Integrated Systems Deployment, Interoperability Standards and Strategies for Transformational Change in the UK, Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands.

He has lectured at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Stanford, and currently contributes to graduate courses in Healthcare Leadership at UCSD, and Clinical Informatics Courses at UCSD and CSUSM. He most recently presented to the Telecom Council at Stanford Research Institute, exploring the relationships between mobile applications, social networking, gaming, avatars, and behavioral tools in computers (captology) and health and wellness.

One of his key ultimate goals is the translational bioinformatics opportunities for exploiting a large linked database of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic information and phenotypic findings among the millions of patients within the databases under management. This opportunity is perhaps the most revolutionary opportunity that will come from our investment in clinical information systems and will allow for vastly greater precision and personalization in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of all diseases, and in the maintenance of health. It also creates an opportunity and an imperative for what John refers to as “meta-diagnosis”. Specifically, the vast databases created by the ubiquitous sequencing will help refine clinicians diagnostic approach to many problems. While a genomic sequencing will soon be so inexpensive that it will become part of most health records (with appropriate consent and security), the metabolomic and proteomic probes will likely be subject to patents, profiteering, and additional expense to the healthcare enterprise. John envisions how advanced decision support systems must provide the meta-diagnostics to focus the clinician on opportunities to use expensive probes only when the genomic datasets suggest their value.

John also leads a team that is building the infrastructure and applications for consumer directed healthcare using advanced decision support, mobile platforms, social networking, and computer-managed behavioral models of affecting change (captologies). He keynoted two national conferences on consumer/mobile healthcare in September of last year, and continues to keynote various conferences on healthcare information technology on a frequent basis. John has an intense interest in how to exploit information technology to create new ways to support how consumers interact with their health and wellness coaches, but also how they interact with the ever-escalating avalanche of communication created by the internet revolution, through the use of mass-customized avatars and personal digital health coaches.

John’s passion is to reduce the cycle time from the discovery of new information to universal deployment of that new knowledge through effective decision support systems. Improving the health of the entire population is the critical organizing force behind the efforts of his entire team. He is also committed to transforming the incentive system around healthcare delivery to one that directly rewards objective improvements in health outcomes while reducing costs. He is convinced that HIT is not only table stakes for achieving that goal, but also represents the critical underpinning to a mature incentive system that focuses on meaningful outcomes (rather than widgets of work or proxies for health in most current incentive models). He focuses on the next transformational shifts required to achieve those goals, and is especially interested in systems that directly incentivize consumers and their social networks to improve their own health through the use of mobile applications, gamification, health coach avatars, and pervasive sensors.

In January 2011, John was named as one of the first six to receive the Health Data Management recognition as a “Game Changer” in Health IT for his many contributions to this field.

In his spare time John enjoys scuba diving, underwater photography, surfing, tennis, growing tomatoes, and most of all time with his family.

John McDaniel, National Practice Leader – US Healthcare Provider Market, US Public Sector Division, NetApp

Darrin Montalvo, President, Integrated Service, St. Joseph Health

Richard Pizzi, Editorial Director, MedTech Media

Richard Pizzi is the Editorial Director at MedTech Media, an integrated media company based in New Gloucester, Maine. MedTech brands include Healthcare IT News, Healthcare Finance News, Healthcare Payer News, Government Health IT, mHIMSS.org and PhysBizTech. Pizzi was the Editor of Healthcare Finance News when he assumed the role of Editorial Director. Before that, he was Associate Editor of Healthcare IT News. Prior to joining MedTech, Pizzi was Senior Editor at Clinical Laboratory News, where he covered hospital pathology, laboratory medicine and the in vitro diagnostics industry. He has written and spoken on myriad healthcare, scientific and business topics.

William Russell, CIO, St. Joseph Health

Bill Russell brings twenty years of experience in the rapidly evolving information technology sector to his current position as Chief Information Officer for Saint Joseph Health. Prior to be named SJH’s CIO he had been serving as the system’s interim CIO for several months and prior to that he had work extensively in a consultative capacity assessing a broad range of SJH information systems, from infrastructure to clinical applications. Throughout his career, Bill has demonstrated an ability to blend high-tech expertise with sensitivity to the high-touch requirements of complex organizations like those in healthcare that depend on highly-trained, highly-skilled professionals.

During his tenure at SJH, Bill has placed a high priority on matching the most promising new IT strategies and approaches with SJH’s own need for improving organizational collaboration, sharing medical information more easily and boosting IT system performance overall. Moving forward, Bill is working to increase SJH’s information sophistication—a key dimension of performance for the system—by focusing on ways to master our vast stores of healthcare data, to better analyze this information and to accelerate its use to improve patient health.

Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and has completed executive education courses and health care IT leadership training at the Harvard School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Larry Stofko, Executive Vice President, The Innovation Institute

Larry Stofko is Executive Vice President at The Innovation Institute. The Innovation Institute is a recently formed, for-profit LLC structured to respond agilely to the long and short-term needs of the healthcare industry. It is composed of three distinct elements—an innovation laboratory, an investment fund, and an enterprise development group. Larry will lead the Innovation Lab which includes ideation, prototyping, piloting, and commercialization of new products, technologies, and companies.

Mr. Stofko has nearly 25 years of experience in healthcare information technology and was previously honored with CIO Magazine’s inaugural “Ones to Watch” award as an up-and-coming IT executive. He has been recognized as one of the 2012 Top 25 Healthcare CIOs in InformationWeek Healthcare’s second annual compilation of IT executives which highlights the exceptional thinkers and doers, the visionaries and the innovators who are moving patient care forward. Larry has a true passion for technology and innovation, speaking nationally on a regular basis. He has a strong reputation for leading change and gaining support for innovative solutions and change.

Most recently he has served as Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer for the St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), a $4.3 billion integrated Catholic healthcare delivery system based in Orange County with 24,000 employees, 14 hospitals and 6,000 physicians. In this capacity, he held corporate-wide responsibility for the development of information technology strategy and the delivery of information services at SJHS. SJHS ranked in the top 100 companies by Information Week 500 through Mr. Stofko’s leadership in performance improvement and adoption of innovative clinical and business technologies.

Larry’s previous experience includes fulfilling the role of Director of Healthcare Consulting for Perot Systems Corporation, a provider of IT services. While at Perot, he led a team of managers and business consultants that provided business strategy, information technology strategy, process redesign and change management for the company’s health industry clients. He also served as a Senior Systems Analyst for Charter Medical Corporation in Macon, Georgia.

Mr. Stofko received a Master of Science in Medical Informatics from Northwestern University (2010), a Graduate Certificate in Health Administration from Trinity University (1994), and an undergraduate degree in Business Information Systems from Georgia College & State University (1987). He serves on the Board of Directors for both The Wooden Floor, a non-profit organization serving low-income youth and families, and for Taller San Jose, an innovative non-profit program that walks young people out of poverty through job training, leading them to a self-reliant future.