AMBIS Annual Lecture - 20 Feb 2009

"Health IT Initiatives in the U.S."
by
Dr Charles Friedman
Deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
US Dept of Health and Human Services

Date: Friday, 20 February 2009
Time: 6.30 – 7.30 pm
Place: PostGraduate Medical Institute (PGMI), SGH
Attendance is free. No registration needed.

About the Speaker:

Charles (Chuck) Friedman, PhD. is the Deputy National Coordinator in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In addition to serving as "second in command" for the office, he is specifically responsible for strategic and operational planning, communications functions, & programs relating to clinical decision support, and international activities.

Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Friedman was Associate Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. In this capacity, he directed the Center for Research Informatics and Information Technology, and functioned as the Institute's Chief Information Officer. Dr. Friedman first joined NIH in 2003, in the role of Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine.

From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he established a health sciences-wide Center for Biomedical Informatics. He also served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences.

Dr. Friedman obtained bachelors and masters degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). His research has focused on how to build information and knowledge resources that benefit clinicians, biomedical researchers, and health professional students, and how to study the effects of these resources. Dr. Friedman has authored or co-authored over 150 articles in scientific journals, and has written a well-known textbook. He is a past president of the ACMI and was Chair of the 2005 Annual AMIA Symposium. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.