American Health Information Community
Population Health and Clinical Care Connections Workgroup Meeting #21
Thursday, October 11, 2007
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>> Judy Sparrow:
Thank you, Jennifer, and welcome everybody to the 21st meeting of the Population Health and Clinical Care Connections Workgroup meeting. We're just wondering if there's a quorum, so we're going to have Jennifer run the roll on the telephone this afternoon. Jennifer?
>> Jennifer Macellaro:
So we've got Leslie Lenert from CDC. Martha Cicchinelli from the CDC. Also Terry Boyd from the CDC. Lisa Dwyer from New York State Department of Health and CTSE. Richard Haberberger from the DOD. Art Davidson from Denver Public Health. Katie Neckers in for Lisa Rovin from the FDA. Jim Sorace from HHS. Chris Lamer from Indian Health Service. Paula Soper from NACCHO, as well as Jennifer Li from NACCHO. Perry Smith from the New York State Department of Health and CSTE. Laura Conn and Shu McGarvey from the ONC. Did I miss anyone on the phone? Okay.
>> Judy Sparrow:
According to my count we have seven actual Workgroup members. So we have not reached a quorum. This is an historical first, unfortunately. But I don't know, Laura, or Kelly, or Dr. Lenert, you might just want to discuss a little bit what happened at the AHIC meeting before and then we will probably have to just terminate, adjourn the meeting until next time. Laura?
>> Laura Conn:
From an ONC perspective we want to introduce Dr. Leslie Lenert, who is taking over the role Dr. Solomon has been playing as alternate to Dr. Gerberding as cochair of the Workgroup. So, welcome Dr. Lenert in this new role, and I'll turn it over to you for a couple of comments although we were hoping to have Dr. Lumpkin as well for starting this discussion, but we can also take it offline and do some background work before our next meeting if that's what you prefer.
>> Les Lenert:
Okay, thank you. I wanted to introduce myself and my background. I am a career medical informatics researcher. I'm a general internist trained at UT Southwestern, medical school at UCLA. Then I completed fellowships in clinical pharmacology and biomedical informatics at Stanford, obtaining a masters degree there, where I subsequently went on to be a faculty, on the faculty of Stanford doing research in clinical pharmacology and health informatics and health services research areas and moving to University of California, San Diego where I was a professor of medicine, director of the VA health services research unit there and an associate director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, an interdisciplinary institute devoted to advancing the role of wireless technologies in the revolution and society basically, sort of revolutionizing approaches for that.
So I came to the CDC about two months ago, and I have assumed the directorship of the National Center for Public Health Informatics, really the first permanent director there, and pleased to take over for Steve and support him and the Agency and Dr. Gerberding in this role. So that's a little bit about me.
I think what was unusual about the meeting was the comments of the Secretary and of Dr. Gerberding herself in response to the letter from the committee. So perhaps the next thing to do would be to review that document so that we could sort of hit the highlights of their commentary. Laura, would you like to do that or would you like me to do that?
>> Laura Conn:
Sure, we can do that. I think what we were thinking was without a quorum we really shouldn't probably continue the public meeting and that we should postpone this conversation to the next meeting when we have a quorum of members.
>> Les Lenert:
That's very good. So to introduce --
>> Laura Conn:
Correct me if I’m wrong on the FACA committee quorum.
>> Judy Sparrow:
That's correct. We do not have a quorum. Just a reminder that the next meeting, the next public meeting is on Friday November 30th. That date was changed.
>> Les Lenert:
Okay.
>> Judy Sparrow:
So with that, I think unless anybody has any final comments we can adjourn.
>> Art Davidson:
Do we know if John Lumpkin is going to be able to call in or are we giving up on that?
>> Kelly Cronin:
We've sent a couple of notes to him. He must be busy with something else right now, which is, as we all know, very unlike him, so it must be something very important. So we'll have to probably figure out offline whether there's an opportunity to try to reconvene in advance of the next Workgroup meeting, since we do have some immediate followup that the Secretary requested on September 18th that will require some Workgroup member participation in sort of responding to the Secretary's request. But I think we could -- before we end the call we could at least make it known that it was a very positive and impressive presentation of the recommendations, and the feedback from the Secretary and the other AHIC members was really exceptional. And also grounded and realistic and really he wanted us to do some additional work and thinking both internally and probably also will require really all public health partners to contemplate what can really be done. But I think we were all -- those who were present or listening, were all very impressed with the Secretary's comments and enthusiasm for our work. So it was really quite something, I think, for him to be so aware and so complementary of the work and the fact that it was really a collective and collaborative effort that got us to where we ended up before September 18th.
>> Art Davidson:
I guess my only question -- this is Art. With John on the call, would that make a quorum?
>> Judy Sparrow:
No we only have 7 and we needed at least 12.
>> Art Davidson:
Okay, then. I defer to your judgment.
>> Judy Sparrow:
Okay. If there are no other comments, then the meeting is adjourned. Thank you all.