Anna O. Orlova, PhD

Public Health Data Standards Consortium
624 N. Broadway
Room 382
Baltimore, MD
USA 21205
Email: aorlova@jhsph.edu

Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Anna Orlova is an Associate, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Division of Health Sciences Informatics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Orlova is also a Clinical Associate Professor at the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Orlova received her PhD from the Moscow State University, Russia. She started her informatics career at the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information in Moscow, Russia. She was appointed as the Director of the Information Center, Ecology and Industrial Wastes, Inc., where she led the development of USSR national information system on industrial wastes. Dr. Orlova worked on lead poisoning prevention at Princeton University and then at Johns Hopkins before returning back to informatics career. Dr. Orlova serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Library of Medicine’s Training Program on Health Sciences Informatics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and NLM/Robert Woods Johnson Foundation grant on public health informatics. Dr. Orlova teaches courses on Public Health Informatics, HIT Standards and Systems Interoperability, and the Role of Public Health in a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Since 2003, Dr. Orlova has been the Executive Director of the Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC) - a non-profit membership-based organization of federal, state and local agencies, professional associations, academia, private and public organizations and individuals – incubated by the Johns Hopkins. In this capacity, Dr. Orlova led the PHDSC Ad Hoc Task Force on Electronic Health Record-Public Health (EHR-PH) that conducted the validation of the Health Level Seven (HL7) EHR functional model from public health perspectives. She also chaired the PHDSC Task Force on the Response to the Request for Information from the DHHS Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on the adoption and implementation of a National Health Information Network. Dr. Orlova serves as facilitator of the PHDSC-IHE Task Force on the development of the White Paper entitled Building a Roadmap for Health Information Systems Interoperability for Public Health that describes for EHR vendors public health information systems and public health needs for health information exchanges (HIEs) with clinical EHR systems. Dr. Orlova served as the Principal Investigator (PI) on the PHDSC subcontract to the DHHS ONC Standards Harmonization Contract that funded the creation of the Health Information Technology Standardization Panel (HITSP). In 2005-2006 under this contract, she served as facilitator of the HITSP Biosurveillance Technical Committee that developed the Interoperability Specification for the national Biosurveillance Use Case. Dr. Orlova is a Co-Chair of the HITSP Population Perspective Technical Committee that has been working on the development of the interoperability specifications for the Quality, Public Health Reporting, and Immunization & Emergency Response and other national Use Cases. Dr. Orlova is a member of the Technical Advisory Panel for the Health Information Technology Privacy & Security Collaboration Contract from the DHHS ONC and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to the RTI International. As a member of the Panel, Dr. Orlova reviewed the reports from the state teams on the privacy and security barriers for health information exchanges, and proposed solutions and implementation plans to address these barriers. Dr. Orlova was a PI on the PHDSC subcontract to Mayo Clinic on the Biosurveillance System (Biosense) Evaluation funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She also served as the PI on the Johns Hopkins project on the Value Proposition for Participation of the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services in HIEs funded by the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services. Dr. Orlova is also the PI on the Cooperative Agreement from CDC to the PHDSC on Assuring the Public Health Needs in Health Information Technology Standardization. Dr. Orlova served as the PI on several projects funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration on the Pediatric Electronic Health Record: Public Health Perspectives resulted in the demonstration of the EHR-PH prototype of child health systems at the HL7 Interoperability Showcase, January 2004; Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Convention, February 2005; and American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Symposium, November 2005. Dr. Orlova was also the PI on the 2005 HRSA contract to the PHDSC on the Functional Requirements Specification for Electronic Data Exchange between Clinical and Public Health Settings: Examples of School Health and Syndromic Surveillance in New York City; the 2006 HRSA contract to the PHDSC to validate the NYC functional requirements; and 2007 HRSA contract to develop functional requirements specification for chronic care management (diabetes care management and surveillance) in Wisconsin. Dr. Orlova is the Project Director on the on-going Johns Hopkins project on Standards for Health Information Exchange funded by HRSA and the HHS Office of Evaluation and Planning (ASPE). Dr. Orlova is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications and a presenter at various national and international forums related to health information technology and informatics.