KnowMED Inc.

S. Ward Casscells, MD

Founder, President

The Honorable S. Ward Casscells, MD is the John E. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Public Health, and Vice President for External Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and Senior Scholar at the Texas Heart Institute.

He is also chairman and CEO of Casscells and Associates, who assist senior leaders by providing very rapid data (including the regular Zogby/Casscells surveys) and insights on health status, quality of health services, healthcare reform, health informatics, and health diplomacy. From 2007-2009 he served as a member of America's Health Information Community, which guided DHHS, DOD, DVA, and private sector efforts to establish standards and incentives for adoption of electronic health records. In addition he chairs KnowMED, Inc, a company, which offers solutions to health IT problems, using semantic web technologies.

From April 2007 through April 2009 he served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs) where he was credited with turning around a struggling $45bn health and education system with 137,000 employees, 10 million patients in 900 clinics and hospitals in 100countries. For this work, and for strengthening ties to HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH, AHRQ, AHIC, DHS, WHO, and NGOs, Dr Casscells received in 2009 the DoD's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Surgeon General's Medallion from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Army's Decoration for Distinguished Civilian Service, the Army's Order of Military Medical Merit, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs Commendation.

Government Executive magazine said of him, "Many Defense leaders say they pay attention to the troops and don't. Casscells does...he is a leader who walks the walk...making rounds at military hospitals...[continuing his policy] would serve the troops well."

Dr. Casscells graduated Yale College and Harvard Medical School (magna cum laude). He trained in medicine and cardiology at Beth Israel, Brigham and Women's, and Massachusetts General Hospitals, the Harvard School of Public Health, National Institutes of Health, and Scripps.

A former associate editor of Circulation, and guest editor of The Lancet, his publications have been in the areas of prevention of heart attack and stroke, information technology, medical ethics, influenza, disaster preparedness, health diplomacy, nanotechnology, and healthcare management. He also speaks publicly about living with cancer.

An inventor, and founder of several companies, including Volcano Corporation, he has served on numerous civic, corporate, and professional boards. His current not-for-profit boards include the Prostate Cancer Foundation, American Telemedicine Association, AMAR Foundation, Safe America, and the Critical Incident Analysis Group. He has been elected to a number of honorary societies.

His work in mobile telemedicine and disaster response earned him the General Maxwell Thurman Award, HHS' Best Public Health Practice Award, and Memorial Hermann Health System's Hero Award. In 2006 he was named a "Noble of the Year" by the Washington Times. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Pike Humanitarian Prize.

His recent book, "When It Mattered Most", a tribute to medics killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, was termed by Newsweek's Evan Thomas, "a noble work".

A colonel in the Army Reserve, Dr Casscells served in Iraq in 2006, earning the Joint Commendation Medal and honorary membership in the Iraqi Medical Regiment.

Parsa Mirhaji, MD. PhD.

Founder, Director

Dr. Parsa Mirhaji MD. PhD. (full biography) is the co-founder of KnowMED, Inc. and was formerly an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director of the Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. While on the UTHSC-H faculty, he developed clinical text understanding algorithms, semantic information integration technologies, EMR interoperability solutions, and a reference architecture for situationally aware systems for public health preparedness (SARA) using semantic technologies and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). 

Dr. Mirhaji has been an active member of W3C workshops focused on applications of Semantic Technologies in Healthcare and Life Sciences, as well as an organizer and committee member of several national and international conferences on ontologies and semantic technologies. Dr Mirhaji is an acting committee member on the Texas Hospital Preparedness Program at the Texas State Department of Health Services and the Texas Institute for Health Policy Research as well as the Health Information Technology Advisory Commission, Texas State Department of Health Services.

Dr. Mirhaji is an inventor with numerous patents and public disclosures covering applications of semantic technologies in information integration, biomedical vocabularies, semantic taxonomy services, clinical text understanding, natural language processing, federation and interoperability of health information systems, automation and model driven (ontology driven) health information systems, structured clinical data entry systems, knowledge-based information retrieval from biomedical and clinical repositories, and distributed architectures for multi-institutional translational research.

Jerry Scott

Chief Operating Officer

Mr. Scott is an entrepreneur. He was the founder and CEO of Healthcare Communications Inc. (HCI), a leading vendor of healthcare systems integration products, most notably the Cloverleaf integration engine. In 1994, Healthcare Informatics magazine named HCI the fastest-growing healthcare software company in the United States. HCI was sold to Healthdyne Corporation and subsequently spun off as a public dividend with a market cap of $135 million. It has since grown into a $100MM revenue company, currently known as Healthvision, and was recently acquired by Lawson Software. There are more than 4,000 customers and 10,000 licenses worldwide.

Mr. Scott was also the Founder and CEO of MedBiquitous Services, Inc., a startup with Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine. Funded by Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic, Corp. Mr. Scott developed all corporate structure for MedBiquitous, including goals, budgets, funding, technology direction, through the startup phase to sustainable revenue, and raised $3 million.

Mr. Scott was formerly President and CEO of CyberPlus Corporation, a provider of controlled medical terminology applications to clinical documentation and delivery. In 1999, CyberPlus was named one of the nation's 100 fastest-growing IT companies in healthcare. Cyberplus was reorganized into Health Language, Inc., a company that provides terminology services to large healthcare providers and service companies, such as Cerner Corporation and Britain’s National Health Service. Mr. Scott raised $11 million from various investors while in his position at CyberPlus.

He was also the Founder and CEO of Lab Force, Inc., for which he raised $14 million from venture funds. Lab Force was the first company to successfully integrate hospital laboratory needs with outside reference laboratory needs into one system.

Mr. Scott has managed and mentored many individuals who have gone on to become successful executives in other companies. He has been an advisor and investor to various companies, including cable service providers (for telemedicine applications), pharmaceutical and medical device companies, medical centers and a market research company.

Dunham F. Jewett

Chairman
Board of Directors

Dunham Jewett is presently the managing partner of Crady, Jewett & McCulley, LLP.  He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1972 and the University of Texas School of Law in 1975, at which time he joined the firm. Mr. Jewett’s legal practice primarily involves representation of a number of entrepreneurs in their business and family endeavors.  These include the organization, financing, purchase and sale of business entities, construction, financing, purchase and sale of real estate, oil and gas issues, and estate planning and succession matters.  Mr. Jewett is a Trustee of the Dorothy Richard Starling Foundation, and the Dickson-Allen Foundation, as well as other family foundations established by his clients.

Web Golinkin

Member
Board of Directors

In 1988, he co-founded and and served as president and chief executive officer of American Medical Communications, Inc., which became one of the nation's largest producers and distributors of health-related television and video programming before it was acquired by Medsite.

In 1993, he co-founded and served as chairman and chief executive officer of America's Health Network, Inc., which became the nation's largest health-related cable television network, with one of the most popular health-related websites, before it was acquired by Fox Entertainment Group, a division of NEWS Corporation.

Mr. Golinkin has spoken at many healthcare industry conferences, has been published in The Wall Street Journal, and was featured in Forbes magazine. He earned a B.A. from Harvard University, is a member of World Presidents' Organization, and is president of the Convenient Care Association.

Charles E. Sheedy, CFA

Member
Board of Directors

Charles E. Sheedy, CFA, is a senior vice president at Fayez Sarofim & Co. and a member of the firm’s Investment Committee. Mr. Sheedy joined the company as an associate in 1971. Over the years, his areas of research responsibility have included retail, consumer staples, electrical equipment, basic industries, and healthcare. He currently has portfolio management responsibilities for numerous separate accounts.

 Mr. Sheedy received an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School in 1971 and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. 1969. He is a Chartered Investment Counselor.

Vipul Kashyab, PhD

Advisor

Dr. Kashyap is an information technology professional with over fourteen years experience in informatics and information technology, spanning various verticals such as Telecommunications, HealthCare, Life Sciences and Agriculture. At CIGNA, Vipul is the Director of Clinical Decision Support and Knowledge Management, where he leads a group that supports the design and deployment of predictive models, decision support rules and other clinical knowledge artifacts into clinical and health advocacy applications.

Prior to CIGNA, Dr. Kashyap was a Senior Medical Informatician at Partners HealthCare, where he was the chief architect on an enterprise wide platform for clinical knowledge and worked on a strategic approach for leveraging knowledge in the context clinical decision support and clinical performance measurement services. Dr Kashyap is on the advisory boards early stage startup companies and has represented his employers on industry groups su ch as the W3C Advisory Committee and the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).

He heads the Task Force on Clinical Observations Interoperability (part of W3C Interest Group on the Healthcare and Life Sciences), chartered with identifying use cases and developing prototypes to demonstrate the value proposition of leveraging clinical data stored in Electronic Medical Records for clinical research and trials.

Dr. Kashyap has advised the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO, UN), was a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and a fellow at the National Library of Medicine in healthcare informatics. Dr. Kashyap has been a co-PI of a DoD funded project on Clinical Decision Support and Knowledge Management and PI of a DoD funded SBIR on Semantic Technologies. Vipul possesses both a Ph.D and Masters degree in Computer Science from Rutgers where his thesis topic was related to the use of domain ontologies for information integration and brokering across distributed information infrastructures. Vipul has published 3 books on the topic of Semantics in Information Brokering and Integration, 50 articles in prestigious conferences and journals. He has presented keynotes at prestigious conferences and workshops, serves on the editorial boards and program committees of prestigious journals and conferences.

Ted Christianson

Advisor

Ted’s startup and advisory work in manufacturing includes optical networking, semiconductor packaging, industrial machines and components, agricultural equipment, and various electromechanical products for business and consumer markets. Ted also is co-founder and chairman of Christianson Systems, the leading U.S. manufacturer of pneumatic grain conveyors and an innovator of bulk ship unloaders used in ports around the world. Ted is a graduate of the Carlson School of Management – University of Minnesota, passed the CPA exam, a named inventor on five patents or patent applications, and is recipient of the “World Trader of the Year” award presented by the former Governor of Minnesota..

Mark Musen, MD, PhD

Chairman,
Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Musen is Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is head of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. He holds an MD from Brown University and a PhD from Stanford.

In 1989, Dr. Musen received the Young Investigator Award for Research in Medical Knowledge Systems from the American Association of Medical Systems and Informatics. He received a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1992.

In 2006, he was recipient of the Donald A. B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Musen sits on the editorial boards of several journals related to biomedical informatics and computer science. He is co-editor of the Handbook of Medical Informatics (Springer-Verlag, 1997) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Ontology.

John D. Halamka, MD, MS

Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Halamka is the Chief Information Officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the U.S. Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Medicine physician.

In 1996, Dr. Halamka joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and continues to integrate his knowledge of medicine and technology, focusing on the use of the Internet to exchange clinical patient data. His research includes security and confidentiality issues, scalability issues, and implementation of standards for exchange of information. Dr. Halamka uses these tools to improve the care of the patients he treats. As CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess, he is responsible for all clinical, financial, administrative and academic information technology, serving 3,000 doctors, 12,000 employees, and 1 million patients. As CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, he oversees all educational, research and administrative computing for 18,000 faculty and 3,000 students.

As Chairman of NEHEN, Dr. Halamka oversees the administrative data exchange among the payors and providers in Massachusetts. As CEO of MA-SHARE, he oversees the Regional Healthcare Information Exchange (RHIO), which develops clinical data exchange efforts throughout the state. As Chair of HITSP, he coordinates the process of electronic standards harmonization amongst stakeholders nationwide. 

Eugene Blackstone, MD

Scientific Advisory Board

Dr. Blackstone is the full-time head of Clinical Investigations at the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart & Vascular Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and staff member of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Quantitative Health Sciences and Transplant Center. Dr. Blackstone is board-certified as Diplomate, National Board of Medical Examiners and as a Fellow, American College of Cardiology.

Since 1993, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and continuing at Cleveland Clinic, he has led a team of computer scientists in developing a novel semantic approach to data storage and use.
 In addition to generating new knowledge from clinical experiences, his specialty interests include novel mathematical models for analysis of time-related and longitudinal clinical outcomes as well as novel algorithmic approaches, quasi-experimental study design, digital signal processing, mathematical process-control models of the circulatory system and semantic knowledge base/database technology.

For three years, Dr. Blackstone served as a Major in the Medical Corps in the United States Army where he was Chief of the Cardiovascular Medicine Branch in the Aviation Medicine Research Division at Fort Rucker, Ala. He became a consultant to the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army and to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Space Lab I, Space Lab II, and Orbital Flight Tests.

Robert M. Kolodner, MD

Scientific Advisory Board

Bob is co-founder and President of Collaborative Transformations, LLC, which consults with government and non-profit organizations regarding their health IT strategies and plans. In addition, he serves as the Executive Vice President and Chief Health Informatics Officer for Open Health Tools, Inc. (OHT), a multinational, non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health of people through the transformation of health information technologies (IT) for personal health, health care delivery, and population health. In these two roles, Dr. Kolodner is continuing his work to improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities worldwide by facilitating the widespread use and rapid, collaborative evolution of health information technology (IT) tools and solutions. Dr. Kolodner brings to his current activities a wealth of experience in health IT from 31 years of Federal service and leadership in two Departments – Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services. From 2006 to April 2009, Robert M. Kolodner MD served as the President’s designated lead for the United States eHealth initiative as the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (IT) in Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). His responsibilities included developing, maintaining, and directing the implementation of a health IT strategic plan as well as directing related national activities that were necessary to advance the nationwide adoption of person-centered, interoperable health IT solutions.

For over 28 years prior to transferring to HHS, Dr. Kolodner had been the key clinical champion in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) providing vision, direction, and effective leadership for the development and pervasive use of VA’s award-winning suite of health IT solutions, including My HealtheVet, a Personal Health Record for veterans, and VistA – the world’s first successful large-scale Electronic Health Record implementation. His VA activities also included research and teaching, with clinical faculty appointments at Emory University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and the University of Maryland.

Dr. Kolodner received his undergraduate degree Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College and medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine, and completed his medical internship at New England Deaconess Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) and psychiatric residency at the Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Kolodner has medical specialty board certification in psychiatry and is a Fellow in the American College of Medical Informatics.