Our Mission
To be a trusted facilitator of the health information and technology transformation required to achieve a person-centered health data economy.
MHDC is dedicated to active and effective collaboration among the healthcare community in their use of data, analysis, and information technology to achieve sustainable improvements in equity, engagement, quality, cost, and effectiveness. Our services address the myriad innovations in data science and analytics, data standardization and exchange, and the governance of a health data economy that puts the individual at its center.
Our History
Since its incorporation in 1978, MHDC has focused its services on data quality, data standardization, interoperability and data exchange, analytics, and modernizing technology and IT processes among members of the New England health community. We convene interested parties for education, discussion of emerging topics in healthcare, collaborative specification of standardized technology projects, and focused implementations of infrastructure. These efforts enable health organizations to meet the needs of every individual, reduce the excessive burdens the industry imposes on all who interact with it, and improve health value.
Our Vision
A patient-centered health data economy that engages individuals to manage their health as they see fit.
The Dolores L. Mitchell Investing in Information Award
Since 1996, MHDC's Investing in Information Awards have honored organizations and individuals who have invested capital, knowledge and leadership to use information to innovate health care delivery, technology, financing and policy.
Previously known as the "INVESTING IN INFORMATION AWARD," this award was renamed in 2013 for long time Consortium Supporter and Board Member, Dolores L. Mitchell, former Executive Director of the Group Insurance Commission for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
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2024: Aneesh Chopra, Chief Strategy Officer, Arcadia; Josh Mandel, Chief Architect, Microsoft Healthcare
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2021: Lee Green, Chief Architect, Enterprise Technology, BCBSMA; Alexandra Mugge, Director and Deputy Chief Health Informatics Officer, CMS
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2019 & 2020: No award due to COVID-19 and the Pandemic
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2018: Ed Park, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Devoted Health
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2017: David Szabo, JD, Locke Lord, MHDC Chairman Emeritus
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2016: David Reis, PhD, David Whitham
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2015: Ellen Hafer; David Querusio
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2014: Justine Carr, MD; William Fandrich; Daniel Nigrin, MD
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2013: Dana Gelb Safran, ScD; Barbara Spivak, MD
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2012: Len Fishman; Joe Kvedar, MD; Richard Lopez, MD
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2011: Andrew Dreyfus; Gary Gottlieb, MD; Ralph de la Torre, MD
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2010: Marylou Buyse, MD; James Conway; Samuel O. Thier, MD
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2009: Lawrence Garber, MD; Eugenia Marcus, MD, FAAP; Todd Rothenhaus, MD, FACEP; Rich Shoup, PhD
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2008: Mitchell L. Adams; Meg Aranow; Louis I. Freedman; David S. Rosenthal, MD
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2007: Leon Goldman, MD; David Szabo, JD; The Massachusetts e-Health Collaborative
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2006: Lawrence K. Gottlieb, MD; Larry Nathanson, MD; James Feldman, MD; Joseph Bergen, DO
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2005: Carl Ascenzo; T. Louis Gutierrez; Community Catalyst
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2004: Kenneth Mandl, MD; Thomas Sullivan, MD; Dolores L. Mitchell
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2003: John D. Halamka, MD, MS; John P. Glaser, PhD; Stephen Burns
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2002: Mary Beckman; Paul F. Levy; Dean Joseph B. Martin, MD, PhD; William D. O’Leary
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2001: Senator Richard T. Moore
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2000: Lucian L. Leape, MD; Albert G. Mulley, Jr., MD
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1999: Bell Atlantic; Massachusetts Health Quality Partners
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1998: MA Division of Health Care Finance & Policy; Massachusetts Department of Public Health; Analog Devices
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1997: The Advisory Committee on Public Disclosure of Physician Information; MA Board of Registration in Medicine; Massachusetts Medical Society; MA Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation
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1996: Digital Equipment Corporation; Group Insurance Commission; Massachusetts Health Purchaser Group; Millipore Corporation; New England HEDIS Coalition
Denny Brennan
Executive Director & CEO
Denny Brennan
Executive Director & CEO
Denny Brennan is the Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC). Denny has over 30 years of experience as a consultant and entrepreneur working with the country’s leading healthcare organizations on strategy, organizational effectiveness, and information and technology management. He brings specialized expertise in assisting organizations in aligning healthcare information and business strategies for success under increased market competition and health reform. His areas of emphasis include strategic and financial planning, organization structure and development, formation and management of Accountable Care Organizations, payment and reimbursement reform, and information technology strategy, including health information governance, security, and exchange. Denny has an MA in Education from Harvard University and MBA from Yale University.
Susan Adams
Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers
Susan Adams
Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers
Commonwealth. Her current work focuses on various digital health tools, interoperability initiatives, and using advance data analytics for identifying and addressing disparities in health care for community health centers. Susan has worked in healthcare technology for 30 years, previously serving as the Chief
Information Officer for a large Federally Qualified Health Center where she was responsible for the strategic direction and management of Information Technology, Quality Data & Reporting, Medical
Records, and Referrals Departments. Susan’s strength lies in her ability to think outside the box and use technology and data to improve operational efficiencies.
Leon Barzin
Massachusetts Medical Society
Leon Barzin
Massachusetts Medical Society
John Budaj
Fallon Health
John Budaj
Fallon Health
John Budaj is the Vice President of Information Technology at Fallon Health. John is responsible for the overall IT vision, strategy, operations, and technology at Fallon Health. John has been with Fallon Health for over 9 years. In addition to his current role, John has led Information Management & Analytics as well as Medical Economics, Data Management & Reporting. Prior to joining Fallon Health, John spent 16 years at ConnectiCare, Inc. responsible for Data Management and Infrastructure and 7 years at United Healthcare. John is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and is an AHIP, Managed Healthcare Professional.
Peter Coakley
LogixHealth
Peter Coakley
LogixHealth
Peter Coakley is the Executive Vice President of Operations at LogixHealth, one of the largest medical coding and billing companies nationwide, providing services for both physicians and hospitals in over 40 states. Peter has been in the senior leadership of LogixHealth for almost 20 years, overseeing both revenue cycle management and technology. Previously, he spent seventeen years with the Massachusetts Department of Health and Hospitals in several roles including in the Patient Accounts department for the Long-Term Care Division. Peter has spent his entire career in the administrative aspects of healthcare. He has over 30 years of experience in revenue cycle management where he has successfully integrated continuously evolving technology solutions into operational processes.
Selma Ferhatbegovic-Fede
Point32Health
Selma Ferhatbegovic-Fede
Point32Health
Selma Ferhatbegovic-Fede is the senior vice president and chief information officer for Point32Health. In this role, she oversees the Information Technology, Business Continuity and Strategic Programs teams, as well as the Corporate Portfolio Management and Integration Management Offices.
Selma has more than 20 years of information technology experience. Prior to joining Point32Health, Selma spent nearly 13 years at Deloitte Consulting, beginning as a consultant and rising to senior manager of systems integration in the Life Sciences and Healthcare sector. Earlier in her career, she worked as a software developer for MadMax Optics in Needham, Massachusetts, and Wealth Compass in Boston, Massachusetts. Selma received a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Northeastern University.
Laurie Finigan
Mass General Brigham
Laurie Finigan
Mass General Brigham
Laurie Finigan is currently a Program Director on the Mass General Brigham Digital Team. Responsibilities include oversight of the Epic Access applications that focus on Admissions, Scheduling, Registration, Authorizations, Referrals and MyChart among other areas. Laurie is also responsible for the MGB eCommerce Team that supports the NEHEN connectivity. Laurie has spent the majority of her 35 + year career at MGB focused on system optimization that improves operational efficiencies in the Revenue Cycle space and Patient Access Capacity.
John Glaser
Harvard Medical School
John Glaser
Harvard Medical School
Dr. John Glaser is an Executive-in-Residence at the Harvard Medical School. He is a former senior vice president of population health, at Cerner Corporation. Previously he was chief executive officer of Siemens Health Services. Prior to Siemens, John was chief information officer at Partners HealthCare.
John was the founding chair of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the past president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He is a former chair of the board of the American Telemedicine Association and a former Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Digital Health, World Economic Forum. He was a Senior Advisor to the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Federal Department of Health and Human Services.
John received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He has written over 200 articles and four books on the strategic application of IT in health care. He is on the faculty of the UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Howard Goldberg
Baystate Health
Howard Goldberg
Baystate Health
at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in developing some of the first clinical systems incorporating networks, relational databases, and multi-windowing clinical workstations. At Baystate Health, Howard oversees clinical systems strategy, data analytics and population health systems, health information management, and clinical engineering. He is currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at UMass—Baystate. Prior to Baystate, Howard held positions at the Harvard teaching hospitals and in industry. He was Sr. Corporate Manager for Informatics Infrastructure at Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare System). Prior to Mass General Brigham, Howard was VP Product Development for Clinician Support Technology, a start-up focused on novel patient portal technology. Prior to Clinical Support Technology, Howard served as faculty at the Center for Clinical Computing at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, having been Associate Director for Informatics at the Deaconess Hospital prior to the merger.
John Kelly
Management Consultant
John Kelly
Management Consultant
John Kelly provides strategic consulting the health care sector, specializing in digital transformation and the democratization of patient care delivery and administration data. John is a nationally recognized health information exchange expert. His wide-ranging experience includes serving as Principal Business Advisor for Edifecs, CIO of healthcare network provider NaviNet, director of eBusiness Architecture at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and managing director of his own health IT consulting firm. He also served as the architect and technical lead for the development of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ statewide HIE project.
Craig Monsen
Atrius Health
Craig Monsen
Atrius Health
Craig Monsen currently serves as Atrius Health’s Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Center Director for the Academic Institute’s Center for Informatics at Atrius Health. Craig is on a mission to leverage health information systems to enable the joyful practice of reliable, high-quality care. Craig began his journey into informatics studying biomedical engineering and computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard. During medical school at Johns Hopkins, Craig co-founded his first startup, a data-driven symptom checker called Symcat that was regarded in a BMJ study as the most accurate symptom checker. He completed his combined internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Atrius Health primary care and went on to complete a clinical informatics fellowship at the University of Washington. During this training, Craig co-founded a second startup connecting streams of FHIR-enabled patient data to clinical care workflows that he later successfully sold. Craig’s research has included generating predictive models to promote population health, measuring the impact of electronic health records on provider work, and developing cost transparency tools that help nudge providers towards high value care. He writes and has been an invited, national speaker on topics of consumer engagement, applied predictive analytics, health information interoperability, and value-based care.
Paul Pecoraro
Boston Children's Hospital
Paul Pecoraro
Boston Children's Hospital
Paul Pecoraro is the Senior Vice President, Revenue Cycle at Boston Children's Hospital. Paul often says, I “professionally grew up in healthcare.” With best intentions, he pursued an undergrad in Psychology to land a career as an MD. Struggling to decide whether to be a psychiatrist or neurologist, his path led him to co-op experiences for both, delivering hands-on care to disabled adults, as well as working as an administrative assistant for the Director of Patient Access. It didn’t take him long to realize a career in health care management allowed him more impact, with slightly different credentials. His early jobs included registration and bed placement, system analysis, and revenue cycle training. Driven to influence healthcare at the intersection of clinical, financial, and technical pillars, Paul’s path to various Revenue Cycle roles is a web that involves streamlining front-to-back revenue cycle models, implementing various revenue cycle systems from registration to bed management to billing and about everything in between. Having spent years in academic medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners Healthcare, at entity and corporate roles, he spent recent years working for CVS Health, overseeing strategic planning and revenue cycle for close to 1100 Minute Clinics, and creating digital strategy for functions such as registration, coding, enrollment and credentialing. Having augmented his leadership skills at a Fortune 7 for-profit company, his passion for academic medicine led him to Boston Children’s Hospital. With an aspirational slogan of “until every child is well,” currently leading Financial Clearance and Hospital AR, overseeing risk of approximately $1.8B between the Hospital and Professionals and collecting over $1.2B in cash for the Hospital, his colleagues and team wake up every day working for the #1 children’s hospital in the United States focused on administrative excellence. He has an undergraduate degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston. He currently lives on the South Shore of Boston with his wife and two sons.
Anu Puri
Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association
Anu Puri
Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association
Anu Puri is the Senior Director of Health Care Finance and Research for the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association. Anu has over fifteen years of experience in the health care finance and policy arena including in legislative, regulatory, financial and policy analysis. Her areas of specialization include payment and delivery system reform; healthcare cost and performance trends; impact modeling of reimbursement policy and Medicare quality-based payment reform initiatives. She assists MHA and its members in strategy development on a variety of health policy issues. Anu earned her M. from King George’s Medical College in Lucknow, India, and her MPH from Harvard University.
David Szabo
Locke Lord
David Szabo
Locke Lord
Manu Tandon
Beth Israel Lahey Health
Manu Tandon
Beth Israel Lahey Health
Manu Tandon is the Chief Information Officer for Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH). Manu provides strategic and operational leadership to guide the future direction and integration of the information technology enterprise for the BILH system and enable high-quality service to clinical and business operations. He also leads BILH's Health Technology Exploration Center.
William Young
Berkshire Health Systems
William Young
Berkshire Health Systems
William Young is the Chief Information Officer at Berkshire Health Systems (BHS), where he implemented an Information Technology strategy that included a state-of-the-art Electronic Health system for both hospital-employed and community-based physicians across the Berkshires and has successfully led BHS to achieve Healthcare’s “Most-Wired.”
Bill is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a degree in Technical
Management and concentration in Information Systems, Economics, and Business Law. He has been active in numerous professional and civic organizations, including serving on the
Board of the Adams Community Bank and being an active member of the Health
Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME).
Denny Brennan
Executive Director & CEO
Denny Brennan
Executive Director & CEO
Denny Brennan is the Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium (MHDC). Denny brings over three decades of experience as a consultant and technology services executive working with the country’s leading academic medical centers and medical schools, integrated delivery networks, hospitals, health plans, life sciences companies, industry services providers, and industry associations on strategy, organizational effectiveness, and information management and technology challenges.
Denny’s expertise is in assisting organizations in aligning healthcare information and business strategies for success under increased market competition and health reform. His areas of emphasis includes strategic and financial planning, organization structure and development, formation and management of risk-bearing entities, payment, and reimbursement reform, and information technology strategy, including health information governance, security, and exchange.
Denny has a Masters in Business Administration from the Yale School of Management and a Masters in Human Development and Psychology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
David Delano
Senior Director of Services
David Delano
Senior Director of Services
David Delano is the Senior Director of Services and Security Officer for MHDC, with over 36 years of experience in health informatics, information technology development, integration and interoperability, systems management, and Executive IT leadership. Prior to joining MHDC, David served as health-system CIO for Northern Berkshire Healthcare (North Adams Regional Hospital and Affiliates), was a principal consultant for the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative (MAeHC), and the Executive Director of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network (NEHEN), a self-sustaining, regional health information exchange network transacting primarily administrative data between healthcare payers and providers.
Much of David’s career has been centered on collaborative process improvement and innovative uses of technology to drive advancements in care delivery and operational efficiency. While at Northern Berkshire Healthcare, David chaired several clinical steering committees, including the community wide EHR and HIE steering committee, the PACS Committee, and the inpatient CPOE Steering Committee. David also led the implementation of a community-wide shared electronic health record project and a community health information exchange initiative as a part of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative’s efforts in North Adams. While at MAeHC, David oversaw several strategic and operational initiatives, including developing the MAeHC eCQM (Quality Measures) data analytics platform known as the ‘Quality Data Center’ (QDC). This platform accepted clinical data from multiple EHR sources, normalized data, and processed eCQMs for many client organizations.
David is an Advisory Board member for Boston University’s Master’s in Health Informatics program and is a guest lecturer at BU.
Janice Karin
Director of Policy, Technology, & Innovation
Janice Karin
Director of Policy, Technology, & Innovation
Janice Karin oversees our Data Governance Collaborative, or DGC. The DGC is focused on payer-provider collaboration, data standardization, data exchange, innovation within these areas, and health IT legislation and regulation. Janice has spent much of her career working with databases, APIs, and programming tools in various roles for various companies ranging from startups to large multinational corporations. She has worked in many industries, including health IT, clinical trial support, medical devices, and consumer health aids. Her official title has most often been technical writer. Still, she has always had responsibilities far beyond that position’s traditional duties, including requirements-setting, product design and architecture, programming, testing, usability, project management, research, technical onboarding and training, and technical support. Janice has also worked as a science and mathematics tutor (including for NASA) and as a freelance science and technology reporter and editor covering scientific and technological advances and reviewing hundreds of products.
Janice has a Masters in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Physics from the University of Chicago.
Katie Klossner
Director of Marketing & Communications
Katie Klossner
Director of Marketing & Communications
For over 20 years, Katie has been a leader in community relations, marketing, communications, and fundraising for many different industries including health services research, senior living, libraries, schools, online language learning, eBooks, and educational publishing.
Katie has a BA from SUNY Potsdam, MFA from West Virginia University, a Masters in Public Administration (nonprofit) from CU Denver, and is a Certified Nonprofit Professional (CNP). Originally from New York (Long Island and the Adirondacks), Katie lives in Colorado where she enjoys hiking, skiing, and spending time with her family and two dogs.
Kathleen Tournas
Director of Finance and Administration
Kathleen Tournas
Director of Finance and Administration
Kathleen is responsible for Human Resources, Finance, and all other aspects of MHDC Administration. Prior to MHDC, Kathleen was the Controller for Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative. Kathleen has worked part time to full time as a consultant, analyst, and controller at various small and medium sized companies.
Kathleen has an MBA from Babson College and a BS/BA, Accounting, from Suffolk University.