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Dr. Doug Fridsma
Dr. Doug Fridsma was the Chief Scientist in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Prior to arriving at ONC, Dr. Fridsma was on the teaching staff in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Arizona State University and had a clinical practice at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. Dr. Fridsma completed his medical training at the University of Michigan in 1990, and his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University in 2003. In his role at ONC, Dr. Fridsma leads the divisions that is responsible for managing the Federal Health Architecture, the Standards & Interoperability Framework, and ONC's work in the international and innovation communities. These programs are all focused on providing a foundation for interoperable health information exchange. He served on the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) Board of Directors from 2005-2008, as well as the Health IT Standards Committee from 2009-2010. Dr. Fridsma currently serves as a board member of HL7.
Dr. Doug Fridsma's Latest Blog Posts
Dr. Doug Fridsma | February 8, 2013
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra
A few weeks ago, I described the differences between the concepts of interoperability and health information exchange, both important goals of ONC. In this week’s discussion, I want to dive a little deeper into the characteristics of interoperability and why I believe the solutions are not black and white, but rather a shade of gray.
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Dr. Doug Fridsma | January 31, 2013
Last week, we kicked-off the latest S&I framework initiative called “Structured Data Capture.” In this week’s blog, I’d like to describe why this initiative is a fundamental and important addition to our portfolio of standards to support electronic health record (EHR) interoperability.
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Dr. Doug Fridsma | January 24, 2013
Last week, I highlighted the work ONC does with the international health IT community at a broad level. Today, I’m going to do a “deeper dive” into some of the specifics. It’s important to note that in all of our international efforts we have worked to align our domestic priorities with the international health IT community. Much of our standards work focuses on an international set of “building blocks for interoperability” that aligns with our domestic portfolio of national health IT standards.
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Dr. Doug Fridsma | January 18, 2013
At the Health Information Technology Policy Committee (HITPC) meeting last week, I gave an update on some of the health IT standards and technology highlights from last year, and a high-level view of the work ahead for this year’s standards work.
Obviously, much of the work of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Office of Science & Technology (OST) is focused on the domestic challenges of interoperability and the technology requirements for meaningful use,
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Dr. Doug Fridsma | January 9, 2013
One thing that I’ve learned in the government is that words matter, and sometimes, particularly in complicated or technical areas, it can be hard to use words that are precise and accurate. Sometimes we use the same term to apply to a broad range of concepts or ideas because it can be complicated to describe all the nuances captured by that work. Sometimes the words we use start out as verbs and then turn into nouns.
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