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David Lansky to Join the Markle Foundation

New York, NY (September 28, 2004) - The Markle Foundation today announced that David Lansky, Ph.D., will join the Foundation as a director of Markle's health program. Dr. Lansky recently stepped down after serving as President of FACCT - the Foundation for Accountability - since its founding in 1995. FACCT is a national non-profit organization, which has worked to improve health care by advocating for an accountable system in which consumers are partners in their care and help shape the delivery of care. Dr. Lansky has been a national leader in a number of national quality initiatives, serving on the Board of Directors of the National Quality Forum and numerous advisory committees to the Institute of Medicine, CMS, JCAHO and other bodies.

"As the efforts to accelerate the use of information technology in health care continue to gain momentum, it is imperative that the needs of healthcare consumers be addressed and that they are principle beneficiaries of the benefits these new technologies will deliver," said Markle Foundation president Zoë Baird. "David has spent his career working on behalf of patients and consumers. His work at FACCT has made a valuable contribution toward improving the quality of care patients receive as well as helping to improve our health care system as a whole. We are delighted that David has chosen to continue his work at Markle and will now be helping our health initiative as we embark on the next phase of our work."

It was recently announced that FACCT will be ending its operations by the end of 2004. The Markle Foundation is committed to seeing that FACCT's most important research reports and products continue to be available to the public and has agreed to host key FACCT content on its own Web site at www.markle.org.

"Over the past several years, the Markle Foundation has worked closely with David and FACCT, and their impact has been particularly valuable to Connecting for Health," said Dr. Carol Diamond, managing director of the Markle Foundation. "When FACCT decided to end its operations, bringing David to Markle seemed like a natural fit as we continue our work to realize information technology's potential to improve health and health care for every individual."

Since 2002, Dr. Lansky has served on the Steering Group of Markle's Connecting for Health initiative and is chair of its Working Group on Personal Health Records.

"Since I started working on clinical data registries in the early 1980s, it has been clear that we could not advance the quality agenda until we had reliable, real-time information on the care that is delivered and experienced by patients. Building out a standardized, interoperable information system that includes the patient and family is essential to fixing our health care system," said David Lansky. "The Markle Foundation, through its Connecting for Health initiative, has been on the cutting edge of accelerating the adoption of information systems in the health care field and I am excited to join this team."

Before joining FACCT, Lansky was regional director of clinical information for Oregon-based Providence Health System. Dr. Lansky's team was responsible for outcomes research, measurement of consumer satisfaction, health risk and health status assessment, development of electronic member and patient records, and communicating with purchasers and the larger community about health care quality.

During 1993 and 1994, Lansky served as staff to the Jackson Hole Group, with responsibility for national accountability measures under the "managed competition" model. He has published over 20 journal articles and book chapters, and speaks internationally on health care quality and improvement. He holds a doctor of philosophy degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

About Connecting for Health
Connecting for Health, conceived and operated by the Markle Foundation, is committed to accelerating actions on a national basis to tackle the technical, financial and policy challenges of bringing healthcare into the information age. Connecting for Health has demonstrated that blending together the knowledge and experience of the public and private sectors can provide a formula for progress, not paralysis. Early in its inception, Connecting for Health convened a remarkable group of government, industry and healthcare leaders that led the national debate on electronic clinical data standards. The group also drove consensus on the adoption of an initial set of standards, developed case studies on privacy and security and helped define the electronic personal health record. In July 2004, Connecting for Health released a timely report that details specific actions the public and private sectors can take to accelerate the adoption of information technology in healthcare. Connecting for Health's Preliminary Roadmap for Achieving Electronic Connectivity in Healthcare calls for all stakeholders from across the healthcare industry to work together to build a health information infrastructure that would improve patient care, reduce medical error and lower costs while protecting patient privacy. For more information, see www.connectingforhealth.org.

About the Markle Foundation
Emerging information and communication technologies possess enormous potential to improve people's lives. The Markle Foundation works to realize this potential by accelerating the use of these technologies to address critical public needs, particularly in the areas of health and national security. The Markle Foundation's overarching goal in the health area is to accelerate the rate at which information technology enables consumers and the health system that supports them to improve health and healthcare. The Foundation's goal is to ensure that the extraordinary potential of 21st century information technology to improve the health and healthcare of each citizen is translated into everyday use as quickly and as effectively as possible.

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