Vindell Washington is becoming the national coordinator for health IT at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, replacing Karen DeSalvo who has been in the post since 2014.
HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said in an Aug. 11 memo that Washington will focus on health IT to “reform how we pay for and deliver care” and oversee the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan and the Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap “to unlock digital health data and ensure it is widely accessible, usable and transferable throughout the public and private sectors.”
Washington, who had previously served as deputy national coordinator under DeSalvo, said the final months of the Obama administration “will be a sprint to the finish.” He said his agenda also includes supporting the administration’s efforts on the Cancer Moonshot and precision medicine initiatives, the latter of which is a model that proposes medical decisions be tailored to the individual patient.
DeSalvo tweeted: “Thrilled to make the hand off to @VindellW to lead @ONC_HealthIT as National Coordinator! Great leader and friend,” with a photo of the two walking arm in arm.
Also via Twitter, Washington said: “I found my passion for #healthIT in the unlikeliest of places: a combat support hospital in Haiti.”
Washington was a U.S. Army captain deployed to Port-au-Prince and used a telecommunications kit atop a Humvee to link with medical specialists in Washington, D.C., to diagnose a solider with a rash with porphyria, a case of a rare skin or nervous system disorder.
“Once you have access to any technology that allows you to significantly improve patient outcomes, you never want to go back,” Washington wrote in a blog post at HealthIT.gov.
Washington attended Penn State University on an Army ROTC scholarship and earned a medical degree from the University of Virginia and a master of science in health care management from the Harvard University School of Public Health.
