Dr. Steven Waldren, MD MS
Director, Center for Health-IT, American Academy of Family Physicians
Steven E. Waldren, M.D., serves as director of the American Academy of Family Physicians' Center for Health IT. Waldren joined the AAFP in May 2004. His in-depth knowledge of health information systems, programming and software, and medical informatics makes him a qualified expert to lead the AAFP's Center for Health IT as it aims to expand its services to thousands more primary care physicians within the next five years.
The Center for Health IT assists family physicians and other primary care doctors at various stages of EHR adoption. The overall mission of the Center is to promote and facilitate the adoption and optimal use of health information technology to improve health care quality, enhance patient safety, and increase practice efficiency so that both patients and physicians benefit.
Waldren demonstrates strong technical skills and a broad understanding of the role of information technology in the present and future of medicine. In addition to directing the AAFP's Center for Health IT, he serves as co-chair of the Physicians' EHR Coalition, a group of representatives from more than 20 professional medical associations that address issues related to health care IT and physician practices. He also is a member of the National Quality Forum's HIT Measure Steering Committee that seeks to identify and endorse physician performance measures for quality improvement related to EHR use.
Waldren serves in a volunteer role as vice chair of the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM)'s E31 Health Information Standards Committee, which is responsible for the development of health care IT standards. He co-founded Open Health Data whose mission is to promote health care data reuse through the development and utilization of open source products and services, and he is a member and past co-chair of the Ambulatory Functionality Working Group of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology.
Additionally, Waldren serves as board chair of the Center for Improving Medication Management, a collaborative forum that promotes the value of pharmacy information technology use with patients and physicians for the purpose of improving medication management overall.
Waldren also serves the industry in the following capacities:
- Co-chair of the Ambulatory Care Quality Alliance's Data Aggregation and HIT Subcommittee.
- Member of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) working group on PDF/H - a best practices standard for PDF in healthcare.
- Member of the American National Standards Institute-Health Care Information Technology Standards Panel (ANSI-HITSP).
- Member of the Certification Commission on Health IT Ambulatory Working Group.
- Co-founder of www.ccrstandard.com.
- Member of Healthcare IT News Editorial Advisory Board.
Waldren is a board-certified family physician. He completed his master's in health care informatics in May 2004 from the University of Missouri, Columbia, while completing a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Medical Informatics Research Fellowship. He completed his family medicine residency at Wesley Family Medicine (University of Kansas School of Medicine), Wichita, Kan. and earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine, Kansas City.
Waldren has presented at more than 30 national conferences that focus on health IT issues in the past three years. He also has co-authored scholarly articles that have been published in several peer-reviewed publications.
Appearances
- State of the Net Conference 2009 January 14, 2009
Biography last updated December 12, 2008