The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services appointed a new leader to drive change and interoperability in healthcare from the federal level.
Mark Roche, a physician informaticist, will take on the newly formed role as chief healthcare informatics officer, a position created last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is set to lead CMS’s core initiatives, including its push for interoperability in healthcare and the MyHealthEData Initiative.
Roche spent more than 16 years working on initiatives such as semantic interoperability, which would enable healthcare systems to share data in a way that’s useful. He also served as a physician adviser to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, according to an email from CMS Administrator Seema Verma to her staff. He aided in developing components of measures like the 2015 E-Certification Rule supporting CMS’ Meaningful Use Stage 3 program, renamed now to the Promoting Interoperability program.
Along with his work on the federal level, Roche also served as an adjunct professor for Northwestern University’s medical informatics program and worked at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
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CMS started its search for a CHIO last summer, a move Verma said was overdue. “The truth is, as the largest healthcare payer in the country, CMS should have had a [chief healthcare informatics officer] function long ago,” she said in a blog post announcing the search.
The decision to create a chief healthcare informatics officer position is an acknowledgement by CMS that the agency couldn’t continue to operate in a business as usual kind of way and hope for different results, according to Verma’s blog post. Roche’s mission will be focused on data — how it could better be shared and used to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, she said.
Date: March 20, 2019
Source: Search HealthIT
