Roster changes Archives

They're busy rearranging the executive deck chairs at the Military Health System while the nomination of Dr. Jonathan Woodson to be the next assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs molders away in the Senate due to a hold by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.

MHS put out a press release on Tuesday that in the absence of Woodson, Dr. Clifford L. Stanley, the Defense Department's undersecretary for personnel and readiness, named Dr. George Peach Taylor Jr., who served as Air Force surgeon general from 2002-2006, as the head guy at MHS, with the rather awkward title of "performing the duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs."

Taylor, I'm told, has been hanging around MHS as an SESer for the past couple of months, and before that was managing director of Federal Government Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers and then did a stint as health care IT veep at Northrop Grumman, which until recently had the biggest chunk of the MHS IT portfolio. Taylor replaces Dr. Charles Rice, who will return to his position as president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

There's a lot more action, insiders told me.

Another MHS newcomer, George Chambers, has been named special assistant to the secretary of health affairs and head of EHR Way Ahead Planning Office (EWAPO), which among other things is supposed to come up with a new commercial electronic health record to replace the loathed AHLTA record system.

Chambers, and his key job, mystifies a lot of folks who track MHS, including those on the Hill. Chambers' LinkedIn bio says he serves in both the MHS job and as vice president of CPS International, which bills itself as the "preeminent provider of Information Systems Solutions and Consulting Services for the Health care community." The CPS website does not say where the company hangs its hat.

Hmmm . . . does this mean an outside "adviser" will now drive development of the next generation military electronic health record? Or, does Chambers have his SES pips, as some folks speculate?

Whatever his status, Chambers has a vast portfolio within MHS. This October, I'm told, he will run the Defense Health Information Management System -- a job currently held by Army Col. Claude Hines -- portal development, critical fixes, distributed development and everything else but raising and lowering the flag at MHS headquarters.

There's other key personnel changes afoot at MHS that I can't write about at the moment, but purpose of the exercise, I'm told, is to burrow in before a new boss is confirmed.

In what has to be considered a coup in the world of federal information technology consulting, Suss Consulting signed July 16 former DISA Chief Information Officer John Garing to its team, along with James Kane, who served as chief Executive officer of rival Federal Sources Inc. for the past decade.

Although DISA plans to compete about $5 billion in network contracts this year, don't expect to get any insights from Garing on these procurements, as ethics rules prohibit him from having anything to do with the agency for a year.

Garing told me he will still have plenty to do and said he would like to help companies doing business with the federal government apply their expertise in the private sector, among other things.

DISA is slated to move from its headquarters on Court House Road in Arlington, Va., to a new campus at Fort Meade, Md., in October. Garing, who lives in Woodbridge, Va., told me that the prospect of the daunting commute was a key factor in his decision to leave the agency.

Now he can work from his house and make nearby meetings without extra wear and tear on his car -- and body, he said.

Wired's Danger Room reports that Peter Lee, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's "leading advocate for crowdsourcing and other ways of tapping new talent is leaving to join Microsoft." Lee, former head of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, was at DARPA for only a year. He developed DARPA's Transformative Apps program.

Danger Room also notes that Lee is "the third director of DARPA's seven major offices to leave since Regina Dugan took over the agency in June 2009."

Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, who ran the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury since it was established in November 2007, left that command on Monday in a very low key ceremony, I'm told.

She now works for Army Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker in a rather unspecified capacity, a typically well-informed source told me, pending retirement in March 2011.

The centers made no public announcement of Sutton's departure, which I find odd because she was the public face of the Defense Department's megabillion dollar a year effort to combat the "invisible wounds of war."

The centers did announce her replacement, Col. Robert W. Saum, an Army psychologist with a Ph.D. in Cognitive Studies from a dual enrollment at the University of San Francisco and Canterbury University in the United Kingdom.

Rob Carey, the Navy's chief information officer, said in a statement he expects to weigh anchor and move to a new position inside government, most likely by the end of the summer.

Carey was appointed Navy CIO in November 2006 when he was serving on active duty as plans officer for a construction regi¬ment in a Seabee regiment in Iraq and took the CIO job in April 2007.

He was the first CIO in the Defense Department to embrace the blogsphere, a practice he still continues with a post this month on the power of information, not networks, data or digits:

Critical to the success of the Navy and Marine Corps is the capability to publish and consume information to support warfighting decisions at will. The Navy termed this outcome "information dominance." But what is it? I believe simply it's about providing any information, to any device, anywhere, at any time giving us the freedom to quickly identify, counter or defeat any threat.

Not a bad sign off.

By default, it sure looks like Dr. Robert (Randy) Petzel, director of the Veterans Affairs Department's Midwest Health Care Network, has all but landed the job as VA's new undersecretary for health.

The department had eyed three candidates for the job, Petzel; St. Louis hospital executive William Schoenhard; and Dr. John R. Feussner, chairman of the Medicine Department at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

As I reported on Oct. 2, VA tapped Schoenhard to serve as deputy undersecretary for health for operations and management, and on Oct. 9, Feussner sent VA Secretary Eric Shinseki a letter saying he was no longer interested in the top doc job.

In that letter, a copy of which made it to Whats HQ in Las Vegas, N.M., Feussner asked he not be considered for the job because during the past few years Veterans Health Administration management functions -- such as information technology facilities planning and management and human resources -- have become centralized in the secretary's office.

Feussner told Shinseki he had concerns about this "apparent uncoupling of the authority and responsibility" at VHA and "there seems to be little reason for remaining active in the USH [under secretary of health] selection process."

That leaves Petzel the last man standing. I expect an official announcement of his appointment by this month.

I've picked up low to medium strength signals that Debra Filippi, the Defense Department's information sharing executive, has emerged as a likely candidate to run the joint interagency program office in charge of sharing information -- including electronic health information -- between the Defense and the Veterans Affairs Department.

Rear Adm. Gregory Timberlake, a physician who headed the program office on an interim basis this year after being recalled to active duty, plans to return home to Mississippi next week, where he is a professor of surgery, physiology and biophysics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Miss..

Defense and VA have been looking for a permanent director for months, and Filippi sure looks like a logical choice, as data sharing is already her game.

More shall be revealed.

After 31 years of service, Dr. Rob Kolodner, National Health IT coordinator from 2006 until this year -- and before that a 28 year stint at the Veterans Affairs Department capped by a tour as chief health informatics officer in Veterans Health Administration -- retires from the federal nest today.

Kolodner, one of the good guys in my view, did not exactly tell me what he plans to do when he grows up -- except to say it will continue to work on electronic health records in a nonprofit kind of way.

In his farewell note, Kolodner emphasized his satisfaction with serving the country's veterans along with his belief in the value of health IT:

"I am delighted to not only to have had the honor to serve our nation's veterans for almost three decades and be able to help them in their time of need after so many of them put themselves in harm's way on our behalf, but also to have had the privilege of participating in VA-wide and nationwide activities to improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient-centered health care. Hopefully, this time we will finally succeed in achieving sufficient health reform to trigger the transformations in health and care that we so desperately need in the U.S.

"Over the years, I've done my best to reinforce and contribute to the understanding that the advances we have been pursuing in health IT have not been about technology, nor even primarily about health care, but instead have been - and are still - about improving the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities."

I can hardly wait to find out what Kolodner plans next.

Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence, announced on Thursday that he selected Dawn Meyerriecks, a former AOL executive and former chief technology officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency, as the new deputy director of national intelligence for acquisition and technology.

Blair said Meyerriecks "is well respected for her work in designing, acquiring and delivering effective intelligence and information systems for the Department of Defense, and for providing some of the best commercial products for the public and private sector. . . . Her understanding of the entire end-to-end process of acquisition will help us deliver state of the art technology efficiently and when it is needed to maintain our advantage over our adversaries."

Meyerriecks sure will have a hefty pool of funds to manage. Blair disclosed this week that the intelligence budget for fiscal 2010 (which begins Oct. 1) will be $75 billion, although he did not say how much would go for acquisitions.

Meyerriecks spent seven years at DISA starting in 1998, including a stint as CTO and technical director for the Joint Interoperability and Engineering Organization. At DISA, she also helped develop the architecture for the Global Information Grid, the system of systems that serves Defense worldwide.

After DISA, Meyerriecks joined AOL where she helped develop products and services for the consumer Web company and then became an independent consultant in 2006.

I'm picking up medium strength signals that retired Army Gen. Elder Granger, who served as program executive officer for the TRICARE management activity in the Military Health System, would really like to become the next assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, replacing Dr. S. Ward Casscells, who retired this April.

If not tapped for the job of the Defense top doc, I hear Granger has a fallback plan: He's angling to run the Veterans Health Administration.

Remember, this is speculation, but pretty well informed.