Mike has been a Reston resident for over 50 years, served on the Reston Association board, and was President of the Reston Citizens Association. He has programed, developed, tested, fielded, operated and managed computer and communications systems for 58 years. At the Defense Department, he worked on the Internet in its early days and was the first chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet standards body. At the General Services Administration he ran the government’s nationwide voice, data and video telecommunications system, FTS2000. After retiring from the government, he worked for EDS and as a consultant, designing solutions in support of over 25 companies’ bids on large government contracts.
In 2000 he ran for Congress because the previous election there was no Democratic candidate and he thought that was unconscionable. While he lost, the campaign exposed him to some unpleasant facts about healthcare in America. We were ranked 37th overall in the world – and first in cost – by the World Health Organization. Our healthcare “system” was fragmented in all respects, including its management of our health data. He joined IEEE USA (the engineering organization responsible for WiFi standards, among others), became a member of its Medical Technology Policy Committee (MTPC) and served as its chair in 2006-2007. The MTPC prepared an analysis of the obstacles to patient-centered health records in 2006, which at the time were many: inadequate standards, difficulties with patient identification, unsettled rights of patients to their data, etc. He was on the board of the (now defunct) Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization, a major, but unsuccessful, effort to exchange records among local providers.
Mike was the family caregiver for his mother, a registered nurse, for 20 years until her death at age 100. They jointly responded to a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Systems (CMS) Proposed Rule for the meaningful use of Electronic Health Records.
He has been a member of the Health Record Banking Alliance (HRBA), an organization which was, and is, working on getting secure, lifetime health records under patient control, since its founding in 2006. In 2021, he decided that developments in standards, laws and technology had advanced enough to reduce the obstacles to secure lifetime health records to try again. He established the Health Information Exchange (HIE) Enhancement Committee in the HRBA to evaluate the potential for the 65 or so state and regional HIEs to become repositories for lifetime health records under patient control. Since 2021, the committee has reviewed the websites of the HIEs, met with the leadership of a diverse set of them, and used patient volunteers to try to obtain their health records from their HIEs. While the efforts continue, they have not found any HIEs that meet the goal of the 2016 Cures Act to provide lifetime secure health records under patient control.
He has responded, individually or with the HRBA, to requests for information from government agencies for health directory services, meaningful use of health records, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for health record exchange, and the potential for HIEs to be data sources for the All-of-Us research program. He has also provided input to a Congressional inquiry on what should be in a Cures Act 2.0, pointing out that the promise of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act to provide lifetime, secure health records has not been met.
These efforts convinced him that, in spite of all the work that has been done, there are no examples of Cures Act records and that, in order to actually achieve that goal, we need to create working examples, with patients in charge of the process. Hence the Reston-Herndon Lifetime Record project.
In 2000 he ran for Congress because the previous election there was no Democratic candidate and he thought that was unconscionable. While he lost, the campaign exposed him to some unpleasant facts about healthcare in America. We were ranked 37th overall in the world – and first in cost – by the World Health Organization. Our healthcare “system” was fragmented in all respects, including its management of our health data. He joined IEEE USA (the engineering organization responsible for WiFi standards, among others), became a member of its Medical Technology Policy Committee (MTPC) and served as its chair in 2006-2007. The MTPC prepared an analysis of the obstacles to patient-centered health records in 2006, which at the time were many: inadequate standards, difficulties with patient identification, unsettled rights of patients to their data, etc. He was on the board of the (now defunct) Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization, a major, but unsuccessful, effort to exchange records among local providers.
Mike was the family caregiver for his mother, a registered nurse, for 20 years until her death at age 100. They jointly responded to a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Systems (CMS) Proposed Rule for the meaningful use of Electronic Health Records.
He has been a member of the Health Record Banking Alliance (HRBA), an organization which was, and is, working on getting secure, lifetime health records under patient control, since its founding in 2006. In 2021, he decided that developments in standards, laws and technology had advanced enough to reduce the obstacles to secure lifetime health records to try again. He established the Health Information Exchange (HIE) Enhancement Committee in the HRBA to evaluate the potential for the 65 or so state and regional HIEs to become repositories for lifetime health records under patient control. Since 2021, the committee has reviewed the websites of the HIEs, met with the leadership of a diverse set of them, and used patient volunteers to try to obtain their health records from their HIEs. While the efforts continue, they have not found any HIEs that meet the goal of the 2016 Cures Act to provide lifetime secure health records under patient control.
He has responded, individually or with the HRBA, to requests for information from government agencies for health directory services, meaningful use of health records, the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) for health record exchange, and the potential for HIEs to be data sources for the All-of-Us research program. He has also provided input to a Congressional inquiry on what should be in a Cures Act 2.0, pointing out that the promise of the 2016 21st Century Cures Act to provide lifetime, secure health records has not been met.
These efforts convinced him that, in spite of all the work that has been done, there are no examples of Cures Act records and that, in order to actually achieve that goal, we need to create working examples, with patients in charge of the process. Hence the Reston-Herndon Lifetime Record project.
