About Us
Elaine A. Blechman, Ph.D. is the founder and president of Prosocial Applications, Professor Emerita of Psychology, U. of Colorado, and a pioneer contributor to the fields of behavioral medicine and behavioral family therapy. “My mission is to provide patient-centered health IT that improves the quality of care for individuals with chronic conditions, automates evidence-based care delivery by health care professionals, and facilitates comparative-effectiveness research.”
Peter C. Raich, MD, FACP is the Chief Medical Officer. Dr. Raich is a board-certified Medical Oncologist and Hematologist with over 35 years of experience in cancer patient care and clinical investigation. He is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver and Comprehensive Cancer Center and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado Denver and Colorado State University. Dr. Raich is Chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Denver Health Medical Center. His research activities include improving informed consent for cancer clinical trials, increasing minority participation for cancer clinical trials, developing and testing decision support interventions for cancer patients, and evaluating patient navigation programs. With NCI funding, he has implemented several patient navigation and counseling programs for underserved patients with abnormal screening tests and with newly diagnosed breast, prostate and colorectal cancers (Patient Navigator Research Program). He is co-principal investigator in a multi-site research consortium evaluating multimedia patient information and decision support programs for breast and prostate cancer patients.
“My prior and current work has confirmed to me that the ability to readily share protected health information between patient and providers will result in improved coordination and quality of care.”
Research Advisory Panel
SYED N. ASAD, M.D., F.A.C.P. is a board certified nephrologist with broad experience in nephrology, Dr. Syed Asad has held several leadership positions at hospitals, dialysis clinics, community health centers and civic associations. Dr. Syed Asad is a medical graduate of Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and completed his postgraduate medical residency and fellowship training in Nephrology at Nassau University Medical Center, East Meadow, NY in 1974. Subsequently, he became a full time faculty member at that institute for fifteen years, and actively engaged in clinical research, medical supervision, and teaching of the house staff and medical students. He held the position of Clinical Associate professor of Medicine at SUNY Stony Brook until 1998. He has been practicing full time Nephrology for more than twenty years. He has done pioneering work in establishing dialysis facilities on Long Island. As a medical director of the Davita dialysis clinic and as a senior attending nephrologist at Huntington hospital, Dr. Asad has been the chair of the quality assurance program for many years. He also was the advisor for the utilization review for in-patients hospital service. Over the years, Dr. Asad has been involved in writing the treatment protocols, templates and effective patient care rounding tools in clinical practice. As such, he has a keen interest in developing the clinical aspects of electronic health record systems.
"My long experience in working with EMR, specifically for dialysis patient population has bolstered my confidence to influence the skeptical and senior practicing doctors to adopt the EHR. Collaborating with SmartPHR/EHR, I feel our team will critically focus on improving the accessibility and affordability of information technology at the front line of the healthcare system".
Michael G. Kahn MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado Denver; Co-Director of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI); Biomedical Informatics core director for the CCTSI; and Director of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Quality & Patient Safety at The Children's Hospital. Dr. Kahn holds joint appointments in the School of Medicine, School of Public Health, College of Nursing and Graduate School at the University of Colorado. In November 2009, he was elected co-chair of the national CTSA Informatics Key Function Committee, which represents the informatics core directors for all CTSA grantees.
Dr. Kahn received a BS in Biological Sciences, a BA in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine and M.D. degree from the University of California, San Diego. He received training in internal medicine at St. Mary's Medical Center, an affiliate program of the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Kahn received a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. In the commercial sector, Dr. Kahn was Vice President of Clinical Informatics at Rodeer Systems and at Fast Track Systems, Inc.
Dr. Kahn's research interests include real-time clinical decision support linked to clinical outcomes monitoring, clinical data warehouses for both operational and retrospective research support, integration of electronic medical records with prospective research, and translational research informatics for both T1 (bench to bedside) and T2 (bedside to community) translational settings.
Arnold L. Potosky, PhD, studies the dissemination and effectiveness of cancer related health care in general clinical practice. Dr. Potosky is currently Professor of Oncology and Director of Health Services Research in the Cancer Control Program, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. Before his appointment there in 2008, Dr. Potosky spent 21 years as Program Director at the NIH, National Cancer Institute (NCI). While at the NCI, he helped build a research program on the utilization, costs, and outcomes of cancer related health services. His current research at Georgetown involves measuring the quality and effectiveness of cancer related health services in cancer survivors, tracking the use and long-term adverse effects of anti-cancer therapies in general practice settings, assessing patient-reported health outcomes, and improving the dissemination of colorectal cancer screening. Dr. Potosky holds a doctorate in health services research and a masters degree in health finance and management from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"Based on my research on the fragmented health care system for persons with cancer, I believe that creating ways to better track and share information among health providers over time could really enhance the coordination and communication between primary care physicians and specialists that cancer survivors require."
W. "RP" Raghupathi, Research Advisory Panel Chair, is professor of information systems in the graduate School of Business, Fordham University, New York. Prior to that, he was professor of information systems at California State University, Chico, California. He is co-editor for North America of the International Journal of Health Information Systems & Informatics. He has also guest edited (with Dr. Joseph Tan) a special issue of Topics in Health Information Management (1999) and guest edited a special section on healthcare information systems for Communications of the ACM (1997). He was the founding editor of the International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Organizations. He also served as an Ad Hoc Editorial Review Board Member, Journal of Systems Management of the Association for Systems Management. Prof. Raghupathi has published over 90 papers in referred journals, conference proceedings, abstracts in international conferences, book chapters, editorials and reviews, including several in the health care IT field in journals such as Methods of Information in Medicine and International Journal of Medical Informatics.
"Interoperability and a web-based service-oriented approach are essential for the success of health information technology in enabling the access to and sharing of health data across the participants in health care delivery."
Stephen Ross, MD, is a board-certified internist with 14 years of clinical practice and research interests in personal health records and health information exchange. He is Associate Professor in the University of Colorado Division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Ross was the principal investigator on projects to develop and assess personal health records for congestive heart failure (SPPARO) and diabetes (Diabetes-STAR). Dr. Ross was also principal investigator for the team developing a prototype interoperable PHR (the Colorado Care Tablet) for use assist in care transitions as part of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Project HealthDesign. More recently, he has conducted work on motivators for adoption of health information exchange in small-to-medium sized primary care practices. Current projects include a study of the effects of health information exchange on test utilization, and the application of information technologies in the office and at home to improve adolescent care.
"My clinical experience with electronic health records, my prior work with interoperable PHRs, and my ongoing work with health information exchange all motivate my interest in PHR and EHR synergies that can result in better informed, higher quality, patient-centered care."
Lisa Schilling, MD, MSPH is a board-certified internist and currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She received her medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, where she also completed an internship and residency, and later joined the faculty. While on faculty at the University of Colorado, she completed a Masters of Science in Public Health. She is a practicing internist with over 17 years of clinical experience. Dr. Schilling has broad expertise in the use of health information technology to improve the care of individual patients and populations. She has expertise in the areas of health information exchange, standardized vocabularies, issues of interoperability, patient identity management, data warehousing, and designing IT systems to measure and improve healthcare quality. Dr. Schilling worked with the Colorado Health Information Exchange (CORHIO) as the Co-Director of Evaluation. She has been a co-investigator on projects to develop a PHR to assist the elderly with care transitions and studies to investigate the impact of regional health information exchanges to decrease unnecessary utilization. Currently, she is the co-Medical Director of the Colorado Associated Health Information Enterprise, which operates a shared data warehouse among federally qualified health centers in Colorado with the purpose of creating actionable information to guide quality improvement, policy and advocacy efforts on behalf of the health centers and the population they serve. She is also the PI of AHRQ funded RO1 to develop and assess a federated network of practices serving the safety net population to participate in patient-centered comparative effectiveness research.
"My experience with patient care, provider use of electronic health records and the scattered locations of important clinical information, confirms my belief that substantial benefits to patients and the health care system can be realized if we expand patient care beyond the walls of the physician's office. Applications such as SmartPHR allow us to do so."
