Walter Suarez, MD, MPH

Institute for HIPAA/HIT Education and Research
514 Triadelphia Way
Alexandria, VA
USA 22312
Email: walter.suarez@sga.us.com

Biographical Sketch:
2002-Present - President and CEO, Institute for HIPAA/HIT Education and Research, Alexandria, VA 2004-Present - President, Public Health Data Standards Consortium, Baltimore, MD 1994-2002 - Executive Director, Minnesota Health Data Institute, St. Paul, MN 1989-1994 - Director, Health Care Cost Information System, Minnesota Department of Health, St. Paul, MN Dr. Suarez is a physician and a public health and medical information systems specialist. During his tenure at the Health Department, he was responsible for drafting a comprehensive legislative proposal that later became the “Minnesota Healthcare Administrative Simplification Act” of 1994 (MN Statutes § 62J.50). 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). In the past 10 years he 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 these topics. He has 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 was recently appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to the prestigious National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS). He is also an active member of several national organizations, including: -- Founding President of the Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC) -- Executive Board of the Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force (JPHITF) -- Board of Directors of the Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HISTP) -- Technical Advisory Panel of the Health Information Security and Privacy Collaborative (HISPC) -- Privacy/Compliance Expert Panel, Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) -- National Uniform Claims Committee (NUCC) Authored or coauthor of more than 50 publications, tools, implementation guides, related to HIPAA, Health IT and HIE. Numerous presenations at scientific meetings. 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.