Posted on November 23, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Dr. Kibbe is well known and highly respected as an innovator and independent thought leader in the fields of primary care EHR technology and consumer health IT in the United States. A co-developer of the ASTM Continuity of Care Record standard, or CCR, that utilizes XML for computable health information exchange, he is an experienced clinician who practiced medicine in private and academic settings for more than 15 years. Dr. Kibbe has taught informatics at the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and founded two health care IT companies. From 2002 until 2006, Dr. Kibbe was the founding Director of the Center for Health Information Technology for the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the membership organization that represents over 95,000 U.S. family doctors. The Center is now the locus of the AAFP’s technical expertise, advocacy, research and member services associated with health IT, and a leading international resource on information and communications technology for physicians in primary care.
Kibbe maintains his relationship on a part time basis with the AAFP as Senior Advisor, is an active blogger on health IT policy, and provides strategic, policy, and IT consulting to a wide variety of firms and institutions. He is a frequent speaker on health IT trends and innovations, especially on the topics of patient engagement and physician-patient information sharing.
Posted on November 19, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Melanie Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, is an interdisciplinary science generalist and hedge fund manager based in Silicon Valley. Ms. Swan’s educational background includes an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University and recent coursework in bioscience, nanotechnology, physics and computer science.
Ms. Swan’s career has focused on research, finance and entrepreneurship, including founding a technology startup company, GroupPurchase, which aggregated small business buying groups. She was Director of Research at Telecoms Consultancy RHK/Ovum and previously held management and finance positions at iPass in Silicon Valley, J.P. Morgan in New York, Fidelity in Boston and Arthur Andersen in Los Angeles.
Ms. Swan serves as an advisor to research foundations, government agencies, corporations and startups and is active in the community promoting science and technology, and opportunities for women. She designs professional and educational simulations, including “Discontinuity Futures,” “Being an Entrepreneur” and “The Trader’s Pit.” Ms. Swan is the former Treasurer of San Francisco-based non-profit Equal Rights Advocates, an Advisory Board member of the Foundational Questions Institute, Lifeboat Foundation and Accelerating Studies Foundation, a presenter at the Expanding Your Horizons math and science conference and co-moderator of the Philadelphia and BoulderFuture Salons, free monthly events discussing science and technology innovations and their implications. Ms. Swan speaks French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Posted on October 2, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Michael Stollar is VP of marketing and communications at HMSA, Hawaii’s Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance company. I had heard about him because of the pioneering work he and HMSA had done with online consultations for Hawaiian patients and he kindly shared his experiences for my new book. Then I learned about his most recent work, this time pioneering social media with HMSA.
Posted on October 1, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Fred Eberlein is co-founder and CEO of ReliefInSite. Fred’s career spans more than 25 years in the computer industry, working both in the US and Europe. His interest in pain management started in June 2000 during a meeting he had with Dr. Mark Perloe, in Atlanta. At that time Fred, an earlier investor in the medical technology start-up Ovusoft, was seeking Mark’s feedback on this unique fertility planning application. He had no idea the meeting would evolve into an ongoing and far-reaching interest in pain management that would eventually lead to the creation of ReliefInsite some years later.
Posted on September 27, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
David Rearick, DO, MBA, CPE, received his DO from Midwestern University, Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, and his MBA from Emory University. He is known nationally as an expert in the fields of wellness, benefit design and oversight of care management programs. In addition to his frequent speaking engagements and professional articles, Dr. Rearick has authored Good Health is Good Business-an Implementation Guide for Corporate Wellness (www.wellfitadvantage.com). He is a board certified family physician with 20 years of clinical experience. After leaving 20+years of clinical practice, Dr. Rearick served as medical director for Aetna, as Chief Medical Officer of a national health cost containment company, and currently is the VP of Medical Management for Strategic Benefit Solutions, an Atlanta based health and welfare consulting firm helping organization manage their healthcare costs and productivity by implementing health status improvement strategies. He also serves as medical director to the Benefit Advisors Network, a consortium of 30 health and benefit consultancies and Transparent Systems, a pharmacy benefit management procurement consultancy.
Posted on September 15, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Maria Sipka (twitter feed) is the CEO and founder of Linqia, a company whose investors include Esther Dyson, who is on our advisory board. The Linqia marketplace helps monetize social networks by attracting valuable partners. I interviewed her because she can teach clinical teams a lot about creating and managing online communities for and with patients.
Posted on August 5, 2009 by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
Paul Wicks (BSc Dunelm, PhD London, CSci) is part of the research team at PatientsLikeMe. He was born in Reading, England and spent several years living in Switzerland and the United States during childhood. He developed an interest in human biology at A-Level and chose to read Psychology at Durham University. Following his undergraduate degree he was awarded a prize PhD studentship at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. His supervisors were Dr. Laura Goldstein and Dr. Sharon Abrahams, both of whom have undergone clinical and academic training and are two of the leading authorities on the psychological consequences of ALS/MND. The PhD was under the overall supervision of Professor Nigel Leigh, an internationally renowned leader in the field of neurological conditions including rare disorders such as PLS, PMA, PSP and MSA.
For his PhD, Paul travelled the UK testing patients with rare forms of ALS/MND, specifically the genetically inherited familial form of the disease, and progressive muscular atrophy (PMA), which affects only the lower motor neurones. As an adjunct to his main project Paul also carried out the UK’s largest survey of depression and anxiety in MND from a 12-month consecutive sample from King’s College Hospital and collaborated with Dr Martin Turner on a neuroimaging project using PET. He completed his PhD thesis in three years and passed his viva with no corrections; a rare achievement.
During the three years of his PhD he became heavily involved in supporting the Motor Neurone Disease Association; helping to raise £30,000 of donations, writing information sheets, training healthcare professionals, and giving talks to local branches. He has spoken at a number of national and international conferences, and has twice won the British Neuropsychiatry Association prize for best speaker. More recently, Paul was employed by the Parkinson’s Disease Society under Professor Richard Brown on a three year project to investigate depression in Parkinson’s disease.
Paul joined the PatientsLikeMe team as a consultant in 2006 as a moderator in the forum, drawing on his experience at the BUILD forum. Working remotely from London the role quickly expanded to include curation of the treatment and symptom databases, carrying out scientific research, and designing new communities. As the company has grown, the R&D team has grown with it, to include 5 PhDs and 2 RNs working full-time on improving patient outcomes, the only team of its kind in the world.
The son of an IT marketing consultant, Paul has always been at one with technology and interested in communicating ideas. He was the webmaster at the BUILD (Building User Involvement in MND) project, the UK’s largest forum for people with ALS/MND, for five years. He also created the research volunteer database “MindSearch” at the Institute of Psychiatry. Paul has consulted for UK GRAD, an organisation involved in teaching transferable skills to PhD students, and was founder and editor-in-chief of a web based magazine for PhD students in the UK.
RareShare was co-founded by David Isserman and Eric Steel in early 2008 on the idea that there is a better way to bring together patients, families and healthcare professionals to share knowledge and personal experiences about rare medical disorders.
While rare disorders may seem to impact only a small portion of the population, together they affect over 30 million individuals in the United States and Europe alone.
Due to the comparably low level of occurrences of individual rare disorders, there is often a lack of information and support for patients and their families. Our communities are designed for people to share experiences, explore treatment options and find support among others affected by the same disorders.
David Isserman is an experienced entrepreneur with a passion for building companies. Over the years, David has amassed a broad range of knowledge working in the technology, consumer products, retail, biotech, and public relations industries. Prior to founding RareShare, David founded Isserman Consulting, a successful communications and strategy consultancy that advised early-stage companies. Before that, he was a co-founder of The Selling Block, a company specializing in asset liquidation for businesses, which he sold in 2006. David holds a Bachelor’s in Business from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and is currently an MBA candidate at Columbia Business School in New York.
Eric Steele’s background centers around the financing and operations of high growth technology firms. Prior to RareShare, Eric founded ForePoint Networks, a wireless internet service provider delivering high-speed connectivity throughout rural Indiana. Eric has extensive experience working with angel and venture investors and has assisted in closing multiple rounds of financing in both management and consulting roles. Eric is actively involved in the community and sits on numerous boards ranging from entrepreneurship to community outreach.
Dr Amir Hannan is a full time General Practitioner at Haughton Thornley Medical Centres in Hyde and a founding member of the Records Access Collaborative having enabled all his patients to be able to have full access to GP held records via the internet if they wish for over three years. Over 600 patients of his are now accessing their GP records this way. He has helped to develop a practice website, www.htmc.co.uk, which supports patients, clinicians and managers in a world where information and services can be made available for patients and their families.
He is the Information Management &Technology lead for NHS Tameside and Glossop (formerly known as Tameside & Glossop PCT), having recently stepped down as Clinical Governance lead and as a Professional Executive Committee (PEC) member. He is also a member of the local Care Record Development Board supporting patients, clinicians and managers to understand how personal health information can be shared across a health and social care setting and to promote best practice by combining local expertise with national and international experience and knowledge. He has recently become the Primary Care IT lead for NHS North-West (formerly known as North-West Strategic Health Authority) and is a member of the Map of Medicine strategy group, NHS North-West.
He is also the Greater Manchester NHS Clinical Assessment and Treatment Service clinical lead on behalf of Greater Manchester PCTs. Dr Hannan has written and lectured extensively on health informatics matters and his experience to date. He is also a member of the HealthSpace Reference Panel (www.healthspace.nhs.uk) as well as the National Clinical Reference Panel for the Summary Care Record within NHS Connecting for Health (www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk). He is a member of the Clinical Leaders Network (www.cln.nhs.uk); a member of the Primary Healthcare Specialist Group (www.phcsg.org), a branch of the British Computer Society; and a member of the editorial board of the “Journal of Communication in Healthcare”. He feels most patients should become eMPOWERed in order to support Real-Time Digital Medicine!
David Doherty is the Head of Business Development at 3G Doctor, an innovative mHealth startup based in Ireland. Following studies in Medicine at University College Hospital in London, David began to research and design a remote care solution that would provide patients with a means of private and economical access to the attentions of a registered Doctor. The rapid adoption of 3G Video Phones in the UK and Ireland has created this new point of care for more than 8 million patients.
3G Doctor provides a service to the public offering informed consultations with registered Doctors using 3G Video Mobiles. 3G Doctor also provides free tools that help patients securely create, manage and share their important health information using their mobile phone.
