Healthcare IT Executive and Researcher
Greater New York City Area
- Current
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- Associate Clinical Professor of Mental Health Informatics (in Psychiatry) at Columbia University
- Director, Bureau of Mental Health Informatics at New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
- Past
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- Consultant at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS/ASPE)
- Chief, Unit of Psychiatric Informatics at New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
- Assistant Director, Bureau of Evidence Based Medicine and Practice Guidelines at New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
- Fellow at Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics
- Consultant at National Council on Compensation Insurance
- System Architect at National Institute for Mental Health
- Education
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- Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
- Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University
- Cornell University
- Oberlin College
- Recommended
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10 people have recommended Tom - Connections
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- Industry
- Hospital & Health Care
- Websites
Tom White’s Summary
Author William Gibson wrote, “the future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” This is especially true in healthcare and clinical research, where the cycle time between new ideas and disseminated best practices is often measured in decades. Having seen too many loved ones suffer from those delays, my passion is finding ways to reduce that cycle time.
My Bureau of Mental Health Informatics serves as both an R&D shop and a national advocate for improving clinical care and research using healthcare IT. We won a national innovation award for PSYCKES, a combined clinical decision support + business intelligence + disease management system for improving alignment with clinical guidelines and streamlining services and outcomes research. Dialogix, a system for rapidly designing, deploying, and analyzing research studies, has enabled cutting-edge epidemiological and clinical research studies. These platforms solved major challenges in data capture, visualization, and analytics for mental health. On the advocacy side, we ensure that the interests of behavioral health are incorporated into national Healthcare IT and standards activities.
Through consulting for the federal government and coordination of efforts across several national standards organizations, I lead efforts to get extensions to Dialogix adopted as the national standard for interoperable assessment instruments. This will help speed the standardization of two critical content areas – mental health and federal assessment instruments.
Prior successes included the development of best-of-breed systems for neurophysiology and brain imaging NIMH (CORTEX), and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (fMRI); plus a novel content management system for a national insurance regulator (NCCI).
Tom White’s Specialties:
Healthcare IT:
clinical guidelines, evidence-based practice, electronic health records, medical terminologies, data standards, clinical decision support systems, data mining, clinical data warehouses, business intelligence, Medicaid, HL7, LOINC, SOA
Statistics:
epidemiology, clinical trials, outcomes analysis, psychometrics, brain imaging
Tom White’s Experience
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Associate Clinical Professor of Mental Health Informatics (in Psychiatry)
Columbia University
(Educational Institution; 10,001 or more employees; Higher Education industry)
July 2008 — Present (1 year 1 month)
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Director, Bureau of Mental Health Informatics
New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
(Government Agency; Hospital & Health Care industry)
October 2004 — Present (4 years 10 months)
Promoted to create, lead, and evaluate informatics-driven initiatives to improve the quality of care, reduce costs, and accelerate the pace of translational research. A senior executive managing a bureau of 25 staff, I am responsible for extending national standards to support the needs of behavioral health; creating and evaluating clinical decision support and data warehousing systems; specifying requirements for statewide EMR; managing inter-agency and university collaboration and technology transfer; and evaluating the organizational and clinical impact of these informatics initiatives.
Major successes include:
(1) After winning a national award for its deployment in our 25 state inpatient hospitals, PSYCKES has been converted to .NET, applied to Medicaid, and is being rolled-out statewide to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of prescribing practices in mental health.
(2) Extensions to Dialogix are now the federal standard for interoperable assessment instruments. -
Consultant
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS/ASPE)
(Government Agency; Public Policy industry)
November 2005 — June 2007 (1 year 8 months)
As Consultant to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), I architected and championed a solution to Medicaid/Medicare’s (CMS)'s and Social Security (SSA)'s challenge of making their federally required assessment forms compliant with interoperable Health Information Technology standards. This process has now been adopted by CHI, NCVHS, DHHS, HIMSS IHE, and HITSP as a generic strategy for standardizing all federally required survey instruments.
As part of this process, I created the strategy for incorporating these new standards into the National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) thereby facilitating mapping to SNOMED and HL7; and determined a mechanism for messaging this content via HL7 2.5 and 3.0's Continuity of Care Document (CCD). -
Chief, Unit of Psychiatric Informatics
New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
(Government Agency; Hospital & Health Care industry)
September 2003 — October 2004 (1 year 2 months)
Promoted to enhance PSYCKES into a robust disease management + business intelligence system for administrators and front-line clinicians.
Won 2004 Governor’s Workforce Champion Award. -
Assistant Director, Bureau of Evidence Based Medicine and Practice Guidelines
New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH)
(Government Agency; Hospital & Health Care industry)
September 2001 — September 2003 (2 years 1 month)
I was recruited to create an informatics-driven clinical decision support system, PSYCKES, to improve guideline compliance and prescribing practices. I architected and deployed an innovative SAS + Oracle data warehouse + clinical decision support system + data visualization system. It was deployed ahead of time and under budget.
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Fellow
Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics
(Higher Education industry)
1999 — 2001 (2 years)
Created Dialogix (http://www.dialogix.org/), a J2EE application for rapidly designing, deploying and analyzing international research studies. It has supported nearly $100 million in NIH funded studies.
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Consultant
National Council on Compensation Insurance
(Insurance industry)
January 1999 — June 1999 (6 months)
Created a web-based (XML + ASP + Oracle) document management system for their core services - insurance regulations and rates.
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System Architect
National Institute for Mental Health
(Research industry)
1989 — 1997 (8 years)
Created CORTEX (http://www.cortex.salk.edu/), an internationally recognized program for data acquisition and experimental control.
Tom White’s Education
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Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
MA , Informatics , 1998 — 2002
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Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University
MD , 1990 — 1999
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Cornell University
MS , Neuroscience , 1990 — 1997
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Oberlin College
BA , Neuroscience , 1985 — 1989
Additional Information
Tom White’s Websites:
Tom White’s Honors:
Council of State Governments Innovations Award, 2005
Governor's Workforce Development Award, 2004
Phi Beta Kappa
Sigma Xi
Tom White’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
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- job inquiries
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