Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, Ph.D.
Director, Office of Economic Analysis and Modeling  

Melinda Beeuwkes Bunton, PhD Director, Office of Economic Analysis

 Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, Ph.D., is the Director of the ONC’s Office of Economic Analysis and Modeling.  In that role she seeks to:    

• Use economic analysis and models to describe and understand the factors driving: a) the adoption, meaningful use, and interoperability of EHRs; and b) information exchange.
   
• Generate reports, data, and strategies to measure ONC’s progress towards its goals and to help ONC achieve those goals.  Provide consultation on methodologies and metrics for the design and evaluation of ONC grants, contracts, and programs.
   
• Contribute to ONC’s regulatory processes and policy-development activities involving the analysis of costs, benefits, market forces, and other economic issues.
   
• Represent ONC in departmental discussions involving health policy, economics, and data analysis and policies/reforms that would leverage Health IT and in the broader health economics and health services research community.

Dr. Buntin was previously deputy director of RAND Health’s Economics, Financing, and Organization Program, director of Public Sector Initiatives for RAND Health, and co-director of the Bing Center for Health Economics.  Her research at RAND focused on insurance benefit design, health insurance markets, provider payment, and the care use and needs of the elderly.  Her most recent projects included: an analysis of the best way to design a national health insurance pooling system or “connector;” a study of the effects of consumer-directed health care on health care access, costs, and quality involving over 40 employers offering consumer-directed plans; and an NIA-funded study of the effects of Medicare payment changes on post-acute care costs and outcomes.  Dr. Buntin has also worked on projects and published in the areas of disease management, the market for individual health insurance, Medicare payment for post-acute care, the financing of end-of-life care, physician payment, and Medicare managed care plan design and payment. She graduated from the Ph.D. Program in Health Policy at Harvard University where she concentrated in health economics and specialized in the economics of the Medicare program.

Charles P. Friedman, PhD.
Chief Scientific Officer  

Charles P. Friedman, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer

Charles P. Friedman, PhD. is currently the Chief Scientific Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  As ONC’s chief scientist, he leads a group responsible for tracking and promoting innovation in health IT, for research programs to improve technology, for applications of health IT that support basic and clinical research, for evaluation of all of ONC’s programs, for programs to develop the health IT workforce, and for activities supporting global eHealth.  Dr. Friedman served as Deputy National Coordinator for two years prior to assuming his new position.  He was lead author of the national Health IT Strategic Plan released in June of 2008.
 
Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Friedman was Associate Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. In this capacity, he founded the Center for Research Informatics and Information Technology, and functioned as the Institute’s Chief Information Officer. Dr. Friedman first joined NIH in 2003, as a Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine. From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he established a health sciences-wide Center for Biomedical Informatics, a well-funded program of informatics research, and masters and doctoral degree programs in biomedical informatics. He also served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences. 

Dr. Friedman obtained bachelors and masters degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). He wrote his first computer program in 1966.  He spent over 19 years on the medical school faculty at UNC and served as Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Informatics. In 1985, he established the Laboratory for Computing and Cognition at UNC and, in 1992, started UNC’s medical informatics training program. 

Dr. Friedman has written extensively for scientific journals, and authored a well-known textbook.  He is a past president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was the 2005 chair of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 

Office of the Deputy National Coordinator for Operations
Lis Handley (Acting): Handley is succeeding Dr. Friedman. 

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Note: While Dr. Friedman has been working as Chief Scientific Officer since late in 2009, and his role acknowleged as such, the position was formally place on the ONC site on February 12, 2010.

The Secretary of HHS is responsible for naming the Chief Privacy Officer by February 17, 2010.