Chair

Membership

  • Angela M. Alton
    Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer
    City of Hope
    Duarte, CA 91010

    Angela Alton is Vice President, Chief Privacy Officer for City of Hope where she is responsible for developing, implementing, and overseeing the daily operations of City of Hope’s systemwide privacy program. Early in her career she worked in direct services with mental health populations for a municipal government. During her tenure with San Mateo County, Angela was the administrative director for a Clinical Trials and Research group that provided access to clinical trial therapies to underserved populations affected by HIV. For the past fifteen years Angela’s work has focused on information privacy, security, and regulatory compliance within healthcare institutions.

    Angela brings experience in health care and regulatory compliance in large academic health care institutions. Previously she served as Vice President, Privacy Officer at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago where she was responsible for the enterprise-wide privacy program of the acute pediatric care hospital, outpatient, and primary care locations as well as the research institute. Angela led the development and implementation of the electronic auditing and monitoring program that monitors access into medical records within Epic, including investigation management, mitigation, and completion of regulatory requirements. She also has served in privacy leadership roles at Sutter Health.

    Angela earned a Master of Public Administration from California State University, East Bay, a BA from University of California, Berkeley in Social Work, and holds certifications in health care privacy, cyber security law and healthcare compliance. She has presented on privacy and regulatory compliance at national and international conferences and also is a faculty member of the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) Privacy Academy.

  • Tammy Feenstra Banks, MBA, FACMPE
    Gobles, MI 49055

    Tammy Feenstra Banks’ professional experience spans over 25 years in health-oriented organizations including a large nonprofit Medical Association, a large health system, and a Fortune 500 managed healthcare and insurance company. She has devoted her career leading multi-stakeholder collaborations to align incentives to solve healthcare’s administrative and clinical workflow challenges in both the private and public sectors to positively impact all stakeholders.

    Currently, Ms. Banks is the Principal/Consultant for ImpactQue LLC, a consulting firm working with start-ups, medical associations and thought leaders. She previously served as the Vice President Medicare Strategy, Value Based Care Programs at Providence St. Joseph Health. Through the identification of key regulatory opportunities for growth and operational performance, she developed and implemented Medicare Value Based Care strategy, program management, and technical advocacy across the system.

    Prior to Providence, she served as Vice President, Industry Relations Claims and Payments within Optum 360 and Vice President Interoperability Program Development (Healthcare Simplification) within Optum. She provided internal business leadership and industry advocacy to advance administrative and clinical data interoperability with the goal to make healthcare more automated, affordable, and patient centered. She also built supportive coalitions and successfully championed the addition of enhanced messaging within future administrative standards.

    Prior to Optum, she served in three medical associations, including 11 years with the American Medical Association Private Sector Advocacy unit. During her leadership, error rates for private health insurers on paid medical claims dropped from 19.3 percent in 2011 to 9.5 percent in 2012, resulting in an estimated $8 billion in health system savings due to a reduction in unnecessary administrative work to reconcile errors through the “Heal the claims process™” National Health Insurer Report Card campaign. The campaign aimed to reduce physician practice administrative costs to 1% of practice revenue vs. the current 10–14% expense. She also successfully championed the capability for payers to increase transparency of entities performing traditional health plan roles on future eligibility and claims remittance advice standard transactions. This included the identification of the specific fee schedule for the patient.

    She holds a master’s degree in business with a quantitative emphasis from Roosevelt University and a bachelor’s degree in business from Alma College. She earned the Fellow, American College of Medical Practice (FACMPE) designation, earned the Certified Coding Specialist-Physician-based (CCS-P) designation from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), and has been nationally recognized for her volunteer leadership contributions by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), Cooperative Exchange (CE), and the Healthcare Administrative Technology Association (HATA). Ms. Feenstra Banks was appointed to the Committee in 2020 and serves on the Subcommittee on Standards.

  • Catherine Molchan Donald, MBA
    Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer
    Alabama Department of Public Health
    Montgomery, AL 36104
    06/11/2023 – 06/10/2027

    Catherine Molchan Donald is Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health overseeing the Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of Information Technology, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Central Billing Unit, Finance, and Facilities Management.

    Prior to assuming this role in 2017, Ms. Donald spent 30 years working in the Center for Health Statistics.  She began her career working with all providers of birth, death, marriage, divorce and fetal death records.  This included resolving data quality issues and identifying areas for improvement.  In 2009, Ms. Donald was named Alabama State Registrar and Director of the Center for Health Statistics.

    During her time with the Center, Ms. Donald worked on numerous initiatives and committees to improve the quality of data collected at both the state and national levels. At the state level she was responsible for implementing the NCHS 2003 versions of the standard birth and death certificates.  She also worked closely with researchers requesting Alabama data to ensure data released to researchers would meet their needs and maintain the confidentiality of individuals.

    Nationally, Ms. Donald has worked with NCHS on several projects such as participating on the committee to revise the Model Vital Statistics Act and Regulations.  She was also a member of the NCHS VIEWS Committee which developed standards for a computer module for states to use in conjunction with their Electronic Death Registration Systems (EDRS) to improve collection and coding of cause of death information.

    Ms. Donald spent 10 years on the Board of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information System (NAPHSIS).  She is currently a member of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and serves on several committees.  Ms. Donald was appointed to the Committee in 2023.

  • Jamie Ferguson
    VP, Health IT Strategy & Policy
    Kaiser Permanente
    Anacortes, WA 98221

    Jamie Ferguson is Vice President of Health Information Technology (IT) Strategy and Policy at Kaiser Permanente and a fellow of the Institute for Health Policy. He is responsible for Kaiser Permanente standards, strategies, policies, and external relations related to health IT informatics, privacy, security, and artificial intelligence.  Prior to these assignments, Mr. Ferguson was responsible for information architecture and strategy, and he managed the data systems for Kaiser Permanente’s clinical and administrative operations as executive director of Information Management.

    Mr. Ferguson has served on numerous government advisory groups and health IT organizations, and has taught, lectured, published articles, and received awards for his work in healthcare informatics.  He served on the HHS Health IT Policy Committee, and he chaired the Clinical Operations and Vocabulary subcommittees of ONC’s Health IT Standards Committee. He is the Kaiser Foundation Hospitals’ legal entity-appointed representative (LEAR) to the European Commission (EC) for research projects supporting the US-EU Memorandum of Understanding between HHS and the EC.  Mr. Ferguson has represented healthcare interests on boards of private organizations including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), World Economic Forum (WEF), the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), and the Sequoia Project.  He also has held leadership roles in healthcare standards developing organizations including SNOMED International, Health Level Seven International (HL7), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

    Mr. Ferguson earned a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and completed graduate coursework in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was appointed to the Committee in 2020 and serves on the Subcommittee on Standards, the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security, and Committee’s ICD-11 Work Group.

  • Michael L Hodgkins, MD, MPH
    Health Care Consultant
    Home Base Associates, Inc.
    San Diego, CA

     

    Michael Hodgkins is a physician executive with more than 30 years of experience in health services, clinical connectivity and e-business solutions with a strong clinical, managed care, information technology and healthcare regulatory background. His career has focused on strategic planning, business development and the design of solutions that integrate technology with clinical and business operations to promote cost-effective, high quality, services.

    Currently, Dr. Hodgkins is Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Sequoia Project, a non-profit, public-private collaborative chartered to advance implementation of secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange. The Sequoia Project is also the Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA). He also co-chaired the Interoperability Matters Leadership Council. The council facilitates the work of the Interoperability Matters public-private cooperative and has established and overseen workgroups focusing on key challenges to interoperability including information blocking, data usability and emergency preparedness.

    Dr. Hodgkins served as the American Medical Associations (AMA) VP and Chief Medical Information Officer where he provided leadership and technology expertise to develop AMA’s digital health strategy, create new business opportunities and inform AMA policy, legislative and regulatory advocacy with respect to all aspects of health IT. While at AMA, he was a co-founder of the Integrated Healthcare Model Initiative (IHMI) for improving data relevance, portability and liquidity in healthcare. IHMI activities included formulating solutions around the clinical, ethical, technical, economic, legal and regulatory challenges in healthcare data exchange. He was also President and Chairman of Xcertia Inc., a partnership between the AMA, AHA and HIMSS to develop industry standards and best practices for digital health apps and other solutions.

    Previously, Dr. Hodgkins was SVP and Chief Medical Officer of NaviNet, Inc., (formerly NaviMedix) a healthcare communications network for data sharing serving the health plan and physician markets. Before that, he was a Founder, EVP and Chief Medical Officer of Kinetra, a leading internet connectivity and e-services company formed through a partnership between Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Eli Lily. He was also VP and Medical Director of the Pharmaceutical Division of the EDS Healthcare Industries Group and was a founder and VP of Interpractice Systems, a clinical information system company formed as a partnership between Harvard Community Health Plan and EDS.

    Dr. Hodgkins holds an AB Biology with Distinction from Stanford University, MPH from UCLA, and MD with Honors from UCSD School of Medicine. He completed an internship and residency in Internal Medicine from UCSF where he also served as Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine. Michael is a Diplomate, American Board of Internal Medicine and was named one of the 26 Smartest People in Health IT by Becker’s Hospital CIO. He is a published author in peer-reviewed and healthcare trade journals and has been an invited speaker at national healthcare conferences. Dr. Hodgkins is one of several patent holders for a “Trust based access to records via encrypted protocol communications with authentication system,” United States Patent: 11328088 (uspto.gov).

  • Lenel James, MBA, FHL7
    Business Lead, Health Information Exchange and Innovation
    Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
    Chicago, IL 60601

     

    Mr. James is the Business Lead for Health Information Exchange and Innovation at Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), on the Health Information Technology (HIT) team. He has been with the Association for over 20 years and is the principal HIT and standards advisor for internal BCBSA proof-of-concept projects with technology partners and BCBS Plans on the effective use of industry standards and innovative use of technology.

    Mr. James has been the BCBSA HL7 voting representative for 19 years. He has been the payer advisor champion for multiple HL7 FHIR Accelerators including the Da Vinci Project, for value-based care health data exchange, the Gravity Project, for Social Determinants of Health, and is a founding member of the FHIR-At-Scale Taskforce, for FHIR standard scalability. He has served as co-chair for the HL7 EHR (Electronic Health Records) Workgroup and the HL7 Payer User Group and currently participates in numerous workgroups. He also has co-authored multiple HL7 standards.

    In addition to his extensive standards development organization involvement, Mr. James has received industry recognition. In 2006, he received the “Award of Merit” from WEDI (Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange) and was named the HL7 “Member of the Year.” In 2019, he received the HL7 John Quinn Fellowship Award, for more than 15 years of leadership and increasing payer community engagement in HL7.

    As part of his 35+ years of experience in clinical information systems, and information technology strategic planning, Mr. James also spent five years as the Acting Director of Clinical Systems for the IT Department of the third largest public hospital in the USA – giving him both a health system and payer perspective on the challenges for the health care industry.

    As part of his history of community engagement, Mr. James was a member of the Executive Committee of the Great Lakes Regional Health Equity Council (RHEC-V). The RHEC was part of an HHS Office of Minority Health initiative, the National Program for Action to End Healthcare Disparities, where he co-chaired the Social Determinates of Health Committee. He also co-founded and co-chaired the Cross-RHEC Community Health Worker Coalition (representing four regions across over 25 states).

    Mr. James holds a BS degree from SIU-Edwardsville and MBA from the University of Illinois. He was appointed to NCVHS in 2023, serving on the Subcommittee on Standards.

  • Steven Wagner, MBA
    Health Information Enterprise Architect (Retired)
    Fort Mohave, AZ 86426
    Email: switconsulting@comcast.net
    Term:  05/01/2023 – 04/30/2027

    Steven Wagner, a U.S. Air Force veteran, brings 36 years of healthcare industry experience including 35 years of government service with expertise in development and implementation of enterprise architecture, including standards, within multiple government healthcare organizations. This includes 15 years leading enterprise architecture development during the era of electronic health record expansion. For a decade, he managed the Federal Health Architecture Standards Program within what evolved into the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) leading coordination and collaboration of standards activities across Federal health agencies, including the Federal Health Interoperability Modeling and Standards (FHIMS) workgroup. Prior to that, he served as Director of the Standards and Community Architecture Office with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) developing enterprise architecture strategy and implementation, and leading development of comprehensive integrated standards for VHA. He also served as Chief Enterprise Architect in Queensland, Australia for one year, leading enterprise architecture development and implementation for Queensland Health.

    Mr. Wagner holds an MBA from the University of Northern Colorado with emphasis in information technology, and a BA in Business Administration from the University of California, Fullerton.

  • Valerie Watzlaf, PhD, MPH, RHIA, FAHIMA
    Associate Professor Emeritus
    University of Pittsburgh
    School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
    Department of Health Information Management
    6030 Forbes Tower, Pittsburgh, PA  15260

    Dr. Valerie Watzlaf is an Associate Professor Emeritus and Part-time Faculty within the Health Information Management (HIM) Department in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (SHRS) at the University of Pittsburgh.  Previously she served as Vice Chair of Education within the Department of HIM in SHRS at Pitt. She has devoted over 40 years to teaching courses in health information management and informatics (including statistics, epidemiology, privacy and security, quality management, and research methods) and conducts research on clinical classification systems (coding productivity and predictive models) and telehealth privacy and security best practices.  She was instrumental as her role as Vice Chair of Education in the development of a new Master of Science in Health Informatics program at the University.  Dr. Watzlaf has worked as an HIM practitioner and consulted in several health care organizations in HIM, long-term care, and epidemiology.

    She was the 2019 President of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), a national HIM association in the US, representing over 100,000 members and was elected to its national Board of Directors by a national ballot and served a three-year term. Dr. Watzlaf has served and chaired other national committees of AHIMA including the Data Quality Task Force; Coding, Policy, and Strategy Committee; Research Committee; Council on Accreditation (which is now CAHIIM—Commission on Accreditation of Health Informatics and Information Management), the Council for Excellence in Education (CEE); and the AHIMA Foundation Board of Directors. She was also appointed by AHIMA to serve on the American Medical Association’s CPT-5 Project and was a member of the Standards and Terminologies Task Force between the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and AHIMA. She served on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of AHIMA (JAHIMA) and Perspectives in HIM and is currently serving on the International Advisory Board (IAB) of the Health Information Management Journal (HIMJ). Dr. Watzlaf has published extensively in the field of HIM. She has delivered over 100 presentations and authored over 100 publications including “Health Informatics Research Methods: Principles and Practice,” which was recently recognized by Doody Enterprises as a Core Title in the Health Sciences for Health Information Management.

    A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Watzlaf received her Bachelor of Science (BS) in Health Records Administration from the School of Health Related Professions; her Master of Public Health (MPH) and Doctorate in Epidemiology from the Graduate School of Public Health; all from the University of Pittsburgh.  She also holds a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Watzlaf has received several awards including the AHIMA Research Triumph Award, PHIMA’s (Pennsylvania’s) Distinguished Member Award, and the University of Pittsburgh’s SHRS Distinguished Alumnus Award.  She was appointed to the Committee in 2020 and serves on the Full Committee, as co-chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality and Security (PCS) and on the Workgroup on Timely and Strategic Action to Inform ICD-11 Policy.

  • Wu Xu, PhD
    Adjunct Faculty, Sociology, Bio-Medical Informatics, and Clinical Epidemiology
    University of Utah
    Salt Lake City, UT 84112

    Dr. Xu is a former State Director of Center for Health Data and Informatics in Utah Department of Health (UDOH). She has more than 25 years of experience in innovation, development and administration of interoperable information systems and analyzing integrated health data for public health policy and practice. Before her retirement in 2018, she oversaw statewide enterprise data management, analysis, exchange and sharing. Dr. Xu was a member of the UDOH Executive Leadership Team and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials’ (ASTHO) Informatics Policy Committee. Dr. Xu was the State Health IT Coordinator and on the Board of Directors for the Utah Health Information Network, Utah’s statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE). She also served as the executive staffer for two state statutory committees: Utah Digital Health Service Commission and Utah Health Data Committee.

    Dr. Xu has served as principal investigator or project director for more than 20 competitive federal grants from HHS and DOJ. She was one of the founding members for Utah’s hospital discharge data system, state immunization information system, and web-based query systems in the 1990s. In recent decades, she focused on promoting interoperability and integration of public health information systems and electronic health information exchange with healthcare systems. She was the inaugural director of Utah Office of Public Health Informatics, Utah All Payer Claims Database, and the UDOH first information security officer. Under her leadership, UDOH has been recognized by CDC’s informatics fellowship program and ASTHO as one of the top informatics-savvy state health departments.

    Currently, Dr. Xu is a member of the Utah Citizens’ Counsel, an independent group of senior community advocates dedicated to improving public policy. Dr. Xu also is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Utah’s Departments of Bio-medical Informatics, Internal Medicine/Clinical Epidemiology, and Sociology. She has published applied research in peer-reviewed journals with her academic colleagues and trainees. She received the 2018 Utah Governor’s Award for Excellence for Outstanding Public Service in her public health career and a Team Award for Outstanding Technology Innovation for timely development and implementation of an overdose alert application for the Utah controlled substance prescription and dispense system.  Dr. Xu received her doctoral degree in sociology with specialty in health demography from Utah State University in 1996, M.A. in Political Sciences, Tianjin Normal University, China in 1983 and B.A. in History, Sichuan University, China, 1980.  Dr. Xu was appointed to NCVHS in 2020.