• Director, Regional Initiatives,
  Vanderbilt Center for Better Health

Mark Frisse is the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. He serves as Director of Regional Informatics Programs. On behalf of the State of Tennessee, he directs the Volunteer eHealth Initiative Regional Health Demonstration Project funded by the Agency for Health Care Quality and Research (AHRQ). He also leads elements of AHRQ’s Health Information Technology Resource Center managed by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. For the Foundation for eHealth Initiative, he is a member of their Leadership Council and he co-chairs a group overseeing regional health initiatives funded through their Connecting Communities for Better Health Program. He serves as an advisor to Washington University’s Center for Health Policy.

Prior to assuming his position at Vanderbilt, Dr. Frisse was Vice President in First Consulting Group’s Clinical Transformation Practice working to advance quality and safety through the application of technology, process redesign, evaluation techniques, and evidence-based practice. His experience includes quality and financial analysis, key metrics assessment, clinical visioning, strategy, vendor selection, pre-implementation planning, and clinical quality program alignment.

Prior to joining First Consulting Group, Dr. Frisse was Chief Medical Officer and Vice President, Clinical Information Services at Express Scripts, one of the Nation’s largest independent pharmaceutical benefits management concerns. He served as general manager for their Practice Patterns Science subsidiary – a firm applying integrated medical and pharmaceutical claims data to reduce practice variation to a client list that included Blue Cross / Blue Shield of Missouri and Humana. He participated in the formation of RxHub – a new approach to electronic transmission of prescriptions from physicians to pharmacies. He was also responsible for the Express Scripts’ DrugDigest consumer Web site and was active in the development of Express Scripts’ consumer e-business strategy.

A Board Certified Internist, Dr. Frisse was a Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean at Washington University School of Medicine and he served as academic director of the Health Services Executive MBA program at the John M. Olin School of Business. In collaboration with the BJC System, he and his colleagues developed several innovative applications for adverse drug event prevention.

Dr. Frisse received his undergraduate degree from Notre Dame University and received his MD and MBA from Washington University. He received a Master’s Degree in Medical Computer Science from Stanford University. Active in medical informatics for 20 years, he is the author of approximately 50 scientific papers, reviews, and book chapters on medical informatics. He served as a consultant for numerous government agencies and health care concerns. He was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Enhancing the Internet for Health Applications and more recently was an author of a national report on ePrescribing prepared by the eHealth Initiative

• Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics
  Director of the Informatics Center
  Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs

Bill Stead is Professor of Medicine, Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Director of the Informatics Center, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, at Vanderbilt University. In these capacities, he is responsible for both the Medical Center's working operation and decision support systems, the Medical Center Library, and an inter-disciplinary faculty unit engaging in biomedical informatics research and training. In 1999, Dr. Stead was named Assistant to the Chancellor for Informatics and Chief Information Architect, a new senior position to lead development of University strategies to take advantage of advances in information technology and knowledge management. He is Chairman of the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health, an organization established in 2002 to address the mission of transformation of the healthcare system through optimal use of information technology.

Dr. Stead received his B.A. and M.D. from Duke University where he also served residencies in Internal Medicine and Nephrology. His medical informatics research career began in 1970 with the construction of an automated, patient history taker and evolved into a long-term interest in computer-based patient records. He was the physician in the physician-engineer partnership that developed the TMR (The Medical Record) medical information system, one of the early systems to be used in practice to create a computer database containing all pertinent clinical data about patients, while providing administrative management for the practice. He has led (as PI) two prominent academic health center, Duke in the1980s, and Vanderbilt in the 1990s, through both planning and implementation phases of large-scale, Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) projects. At Vanderbilt, his team has been successful in creating novel techniques for linking information into diagnostic and treatment processes, in overcoming the cultural barriers to changing practice to take advantage of the techniques, and in reducing the cost and time required to implement the requisite infrastructure.

Dr. Stead was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association from its inception in 1993 until 2002. He is a Founding Fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Institute for Engineering in Biology and Medicine, and a member of the Institute of Medicine. He has served as President of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics and is the immediate past President of the American College of Medical Informatics.

In addition to his academic responsibilities, Dr. Stead is a director of HealthStream, Chief Technology Officer of EBMsolutions, and advisor to VISICU.

• Program Manager, Volunteer eHealth Initiative
  Vanderbilt Center for Better Health

Ms. Estrin is a Senior Consultant in the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health. Her primary role will be to coordinate the regional informatics activities surrounding the six-month Health Information Technology planning initiative commissioned by Governor Bredesen and to work in the same capacity in state-wide demonstration projects and planning. She will also help coordinate a related activity – the collaboration between the Regional Medical Center at Memphis (the Med) and Vanderbilt.

Ms. Estrin trained in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech and later in Healthcare Administration at the University of Wisconsin. After several years in industrial engineering projects at Vanderbilt, Ms. Estrin served as co-lead of a major performance improvement initiative for the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics. In this capacity, she coordinated internal projects for interdepartmental improvement efforts and worked with over 80 community hospitals in the areas of performance improvement, management engineering, information systems analysis, and patient acuity systems.

Returning to Nashville, Ms. Estrin consulted with over hospitals’ boards of trustees, senior management teams, medical staffs and department directors in planning and performance improvement activities. She advanced within her firm and directed sixteen consultants and staff in two consulting practices focusing on productivity management and strategic quality management (SQM). She directed research and development to create products and services to assist rural healthcare facilities with cost reduction and cost management strategies. She also served as a project manager for a productivity and benchmarking system used by over 200 hospitals. She knows Tennessee health care.

Ms. Estrin arrives at a critical juncture in Vanderbilt’s efforts to become a national leader in regional informatics initiatives. She is an engaging “hands on” professional who will be an engaging partner in our efforts within the Center for Better Health, the Department of Biomedical Informatics, the Medical Center, and the State of Tennessee.

• Technical Project Manager, Volunteer eHealth Initiative
  Vanderbilt Center for Better Health

Janet King joined the Vanderbilt eHealth Initiative in December, 2004 as the Technical Project Manager. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, she was employed by First Consulting Group. Her most recent assignment with First had been Testing Manager for a large scale Epic implementation which included ambulatory and inpatient physician order entry and clinical documentation.

Janet’s entire professional life has been in health care. She began her health care career as a Registered Radiographer in 1977. She holds a Bachelor of Health Science (BHS) from the University of Kentucky (1989). She leveraged her operations experience and BHS to enter the dynamic world of information technology project management.

In her first IT position she was fortunate to land a position as a Hospital Project Director working under the direction of a more experienced Corporate Project Director on a system-wide hospital information system (HIS) implementation. After several years in IS management she joined First Consulting Group (FCG) in 1998 where she spent six years working on a variety of projects from Epic to IDX to Lawson. She received certification in the Epic System Orders and Radiology systems. On her final assignment for First she served as Testing Manager for a large scale Epic implementation which included ambulatory and inpatient physician order entry and clinical documentation.