Kaiser Permanente
Director of Health IT Strategy
2221 Broadbirch Dr
Silver Spring,
MD
USA
20904
walter.g.suarez@kp.org
Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Suarez is a physician and a public health and medical information systems specialist, and the Director of Health IT Strategy for Kaiser Permanente. Before joining Kaiser, Dr. Suarez was the President and CEO of the Institute for HIPAA/HIT Education and Research. Prior to this he was the CEO of the Midwest Center for HIPAA Education and before that the Executive Director and CEO of the Minnesota Health Data Institute. He also worked for the Minnesota Department of Health in various senior policy positions.
Dr. Suarez has provided project management, technical and policy consulting services and project/program evaluation services to health care provider organizations, health plans, Medicaid and Medicare programs, Public Health agencies and vendors in the areas of Health IT/HIE, public health data standards, health disparities, quality measurement, health information privacy and security standards, and HIPAA standards including Transactions and Code Sets (TCS) and the National Provider Identifier (NPI).
More recently, Dr. Suarez was a lead consultant to national and regional projects such as the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration ¡V HISPC (ONC-AHRQ), Technical Assistance to Medicaid and CHIP Agencies on Health IT and HIE (AHRQ) and Development of Statewide Uniform Companion Guides for HIPAA Transactions (Minnesota).
Dr. Suarez was appointed in 2008 by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the prestigious National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), where he now co-chairs the Sub-Committee on Standards. Last year the Secretary also appointed him to the HIT Standards Committee of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where he co-chairs the Privacy and Security Workgroup. He is also an active member of several national organizations, including:
ƒŞ Founding President and Member of the Board of the Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC)
ƒŞ Co-Chair of the Privacy and Compliance Workgroup of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT)
ƒŞ Member of the Executive Board of the Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force (JPHITF)
ƒŞ Member of HL7, ISO, and other standard development organizations
He was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HISTP) where he co-chaired the Security, Privacy and Infrastructure Technical Committee, the Clinical Research Tiger Team and the HITSP Education, Communications and Outreach Committee, as well as the National Uniform Claims Committee (NUCC).
In the past 10 years Dr. Suarez has delivered over 200 one-day and two-day educational programs and training seminars for health care providers, public health professionals, and other health care organizations in all of the topics mentioned above. He has also developed and published nationally recognized toolkits for planning and implementing HIPAA Privacy and Security across an enterprise. He has also authored a number of industry papers on a variety of HIPAA, Health IT and HIE topics. He served as the lead HIPAA outreach contractor for several CMS Regional Offices. He is also a guest lecturer on health informatics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Suarez has been the recipient of numerous regional and national awards, including the Minnesota Physician¡¦s ¡§Most Influential Health Care Leaders¡¨ in 1997 and 1998, the WEDI 2004, 2006 and 2007 Distinguished Service Award and the first recipient of WEDI¡¦s prestigious ¡§Andrew H. Melczer¡¨ Excellence in Volunteerism Award, in 2005.