Jeffrey Blair, MBA

After earning an undergraduate degree in management engineering at Rensselear and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Jeff Blair began a 30-year association with IBM Corporation. His move to health care came in the 1980s, accelerated by his role on the IBM advisory team that provided input on a Council on Competitiveness report known as ìHighway to Health: Transforming U.S. Healthcare in the Information Age.î This led to his assumption of key roles in IBM strategic planning, to management of their marketing arm for clinical information systems, and to program management in their medical lexicon services. Since 1997, when he left IBM, Mr. Blair has been Vice-President of the Medical Records Institute. Jeff Blair has actively promoted the development of clinical information systems and related standards for well over a decade. He was heavily involved as a committee chair and Board member of the Computer-Based Patient Record Institute and as an active participant in Health Level 7 (HL7) and CorbaMed. With the passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) law in 1996, he has devoted extensive effort to assisting in the selection of the administrative health data standards it mandates. The Speaker of the House appointed him to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics in 1997, and he has played a key role there in the development of advice on standards for patient medical records. In 1998, Mr. Blair was appointed chair of the work group on computer-based patient records, which had lead responsibility for drafting the HIPAA-mandated report to the Secretary on standards for patient medical record information. Mr. Blair has a comprehensive understanding of incentives, barriers, and opportunities surrounding the implementation of health data standards in the United States. His combined knowledge of standards development processes, commercial system development, health care business systems, and clinical applications is unique, and ACMI is grateful for his important contributions to informatics and to its public visibility.