Meet Our Faculty

MMI faculty and advisory board members are doctors, clinicians, administrators, educators, researchers, and information technology professionals at Northwestern University, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and other leading organizations. Leaders in developing and deploying health information technology, they play an integral part in setting health care standards nationally and bring this expertise to the classroom. The MMI advisory board ensures that the curriculum meets the complexities and demands of the informatics field.

Faisal Akkawi
Faisal Akkawi, MSCIS program director, was on the faculty of Illinois Institute of Technology from 1998 to 2002. He has an MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science from IIT. His area of specialization is software architecture for concurrent systems, and his research interests also include reactive/adaptive intelligent systems and design issues of concurrent programming languages. Akkawi was selected for the NASA Faculty Fellowship Program in 2003 and reported to the Johnson Space Center that May to work in the Avionic Office. He designed and implemented a framework that was used in the advanced diagnostic and advanced caution and warning system for the International Space Station.

Jay M. Anderson
Jay M. Anderson, director of operations and quality for Northwestern Memorial Hospital, is responsible for the installation of process improvement, measurement, and monitoring skills for a large contemporary academic medical center. Prior to his work at Northwestern Memorial, Anderson was a certified Six Sigma Black Belt in the financial services industry for the General Electric Company and a nuclear-trained officer for the United States Navy. He received his BS in systems analysis from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his MBA in finance from the University of Chicago.

Patricia Becker
Patricia Becker is vice president of technology services at University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), where she is responsible for building and managing information systems and services that support the needs of UHC's programs. UHC is a member organization supporting the needs of academic medical centers across the United States. Before joining UHC, Becker was employed at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Health Systems for 19 years in various information services management positions, including an appointment in 1993 as vice president of information systems and chief information officer. She has been an active participant on UHC's CIO Council and has been the CIO representative on UHC's operations committee since its inception in 1998. Becker has an MBA in management systems from DePaul University.

Nicholas Bertram
Nicholas Bertram has worked in the medical informatics field for hospitals, for vendors, and as a consultant. His work in hospitals included direct patient care and systems administration. He is knowledgeable in systems engineering, clinical engineering, and quality assurance due to his vendor-sponsored cross-functional roles. Bertram is currently a senior consultant at Beacon Partners, where he supervises testing on a complex integration of systems including Allscripts TouchWorks electronic health record, Lawson's general ledger and refund system, Siemens Enterprise Access Directory master patient index, Dictaphone's transcription system, QS/1's pharmacy information system, Siemens Novius radiology information system, and Spectrum's laboratory information system (LIS). Bertram has a bachelor's in nuclear medicine technology, as well as an MS in management information systems and MBA from DePaul University.

Richard Gershon
Richard Gershon is director of psychometrics and informatics at the Center on Outcomes, Research and Education (CORE); and a faculty member of Northwestern's psychology department. Gershon is a leading expert in the application of Item Response Theory (IRT) in both individualized and large-scale assessment. He has developed item banks and Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) for educational, clinical, and health applications, including cognitive, emotional, and motor applications. He is currently principal investigator on the NIH Toolbox, the largest contract award in CORE's 10-year history. He is also co-investigator and measurement development expert on two CORE projects, the NINDS sponsored project "Quality of Life Outcomes in Neurological Disorders" (Neuro-QoL), the NIH Roadmap project "Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System" (PROMIS) and the cancer-specific supplement, as well as several smaller projects.

Stasia Kahn
Stasia Kahn has been practicing internal medicine since 1988. She completed her residency at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago after attending the University of Illinois College of Medicine. She currently practices at Fox Prairie Medial Group P.C., which she cofounded, in St. Charles, Illinois, and is an attending staff member at Central DuPage Hospital. Her passion is to use health information technology to improve the safety and quality of patient care, leading to her instrumental role in forming the regional health information exchange group Northern Illinois Physicians for Connectivity, and her spearheading an effort to establish a statewide universal Personal Health Record. Kahn serves on the expert panel Assessing the Economics of Electronic Health Record Adoption and Successful Implementation in Physician Small Practice Settings, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and also serves on the IT systems security workgroup of the Health Information Management Systems Society. In 2004 Kahn published "How to Select and Implement the Right Electronic Medical Records and Practice Management Solution for Your Practice."

Karen Kmetik
Karen Kmetik is director of clinical performance evaluation at the American Medical Association. She directs the performance measure development activities of the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement. Her research interests include integrating nationally endorsed performance measures into electronic health record systems to support quality improvement at the point of care and to provide data for physician certification and payment programs. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina.

Jerome Lassa
Jerry Lassa is a performance-excellence professional with more than 15 years experience in the healthcare sector, serving his first ten years in acute care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the past five in ambulatory care at the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services. The study and application of medical informatics decision support has been a core component of his professional practice. Early in his tenure at Northwestern Memorial, Lassa served on a National Library of Medicine-funded research team that studied the information needs of clinicians in ambulatory care and implemented an electronic health record at various Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation practices. More recently, as the director of performance excellence with the Alliance of Chicago, he is leading the development of clinical performance measures reporting through a data warehouse for electronic health records that is being deployed across 10-plus community health centers that serve 100,000 under- and uninsured patients annually in Chicago. In addition, Lassa has supported numerous clinical pathway teams and deployed an operational and clinical benchmarking system for Northwestern Memorial that enabled benchmarking of resource and ancillary utilization. Lassa consults and speaks nationally on performance excellence in healthcare in addition to teaching statistics and performance excellence at the School of Continuing Studies. He received his MS in applied mathematics with a statistics concentration from DePaul University and a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

David Liebovitz
David Liebovitz is the chief medical informatics officer for the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, the full-time academic medical practice affiliated with the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern. In this role he works to further the development of the outpatient medical records system and optimize information exchange with Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he serves as medical director for clinical information systems. Within the hospital Liebovitz has been the lead physician for implementation of computerized physician order entry and online notes. In addition, he works on the inpatient general medical service, sees outpatients in his clinical practice, and in his role as an associate program director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program, supervises residents' inpatient and outpatient experiences and their interactions with medical records. Liebovitz previously was a full-time faculty member at the University of Chicago. He received his medical degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago and his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Liebovitz is faculty director of the MMI program.

Karin Lindgren
Karin Lindgren is former general counsel and corporate compliance officer for the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC), an alliance of the nonprofit academic medical centers in the U.S. As general counsel and compliance officer she handled the corporate, health law, transactional, e-business, governance, ethical, privacy/security (data protection, HIPAA), antitrust, licensing, government relations, fraud and abuse, intellectual property, SEC, litigation, joint venture, outsourcing, employment, compliance, and regulatory legal needs of both the UHC Foundation and UHC's nine business groups. She has over 22 years of both in-house corporate law experience and major law firm healthcare litigation practice, handling high-profile cutting-edge legal and ethical issues. A nationally prominent speaker and author on medical-legal issues, Lindgren is licensed to practice law in Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania and before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Michael O'Toole
Michael O'Toole is a practicing cardiologist and the chief information officer of Midwest Heart Specialists (MHS) in Illinois. He led the team and codeveloped the cardiology-specific electronic health records system (EHRS) that MHS has been using since 1997 with 100 percent clinician compliance. Since 1999 he has been active in optimizing patient safety and quality measures using point-of-care decision support in an outpatient EHRS. This has led to national recognition, including the Smithsonian/InfoWorld Award (1999) for innovative healthcare information technology and the American Medical Group Association's awards for advance disease management (2001), patient safety (2002), and patient adherence (2003). He led the team that has incorporated and reported on CAD performance measures at MHS and is the coprincipal investigator of Cardio-HIT, a national grant with the AMA to expand that project to other physician groups. He still maintains an active practice as a cardiologist specializing in electrophysiology and is involved in clinical research.

Elizabeth Ryan
Elizabeth Ryan, EdD, is the vice chair of education and an assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. She has 12 years of experience working in medical education ranging from undergraduate to graduate education, primary care to surgical education. Ryan is an active participant in Feinberg's student programs, serving as a faculty tutor and on committees. Ryan has served as the lead reader for student thesis papers in the Master of Arts in Public Policy and Administration program. She was the principal investigator for an Illinois Field Foundation Grant, "Evaluation of a Program Designed to Identify Racial and Ethnic Disparities," and supervised an MPPA student's work on this grant. She has been invited to participate on a panel for the Association of American Medical Colleges Central Group on Educational Affairs to facilitate developing a research agenda pertaining the use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) in medical education. Her research and educational interests include the investigation of how teaching and learning need to change with the utilization of an EHR.

Dale Sanders
Dale Sanders is vice president of information services and CIO at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation. His background includes serving as regional director of information systems and medical informatics for Intermountain Health Care (IHC); vice president of systems integration for Information Technology International; senior systems engineer for TRW Space and Defense Systems Integration Group; and a captain and information systems officer in the U.S. Air Force. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a biology minor from Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, and a certificate in information systems management from the U.S. Air Force. His interests include analytics and data warehousing, systems integration, and effective project leadership and risk management.

Margaret Schulte
Margaret Schulte serves as the editor of Frontiers in Health Services Management, a publication of the American College of Healthcare Executives, as a commissioner with the Council for Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME), and assists the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in education program development. Previously she served as vice president of education for HIMSS, where she was responsible for the professional education programs of this membership association of IT professionals. In this role, she led the development of conference education for the society's annual conference which is attended by over 25,000 professionals and 900 exhibitors, and was responsible for global healthcare IT conferences in Europe and Asia, as well as other educational offerings. Prior to this, she held positions as vice president of research and development for the publishing division of the American Hospital Association; director of education with the Healthcare Financial Management Association, and served on the faculty of the graduate program in Healthcare Policy and Management at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she also served as adjunct faculty to the Mercer University School of Medicine. Previously, she held various management and executive positions in hospitals and in the governmental sector. Schulte holds a doctorate in business administration from Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and an MBA from Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Pallav Sharda
Pallav Sharda is experienced in both the clinical domain and Information technology as a physician and medical informaticist. He has worked in the Healthcare IT industry for over six years in research and commercial settings, fulfilling roles within services and engineering organizations. Pallav currently works as a senior clinical informaticist in the Innovation Engineering organization of GE Healthcare Integrated IT Solutions. During his research study at Columbia University he developed and maintained a decision support system prototype intended for including patient preferences in palliative care. Pallav's special interests focus on implementation and engineering of clinical information systems, controlled terminologies and computerized clinical decision support. He is the primary inventor and co-inventor on several patents held by GE Healthcare, and has authored papers on electronic medical record systems. He currently serves as the executive member of Indian Medical Informatics Association and is a core member of Lab. of Decision Making & Cognition at Columbia University. Pallav received a master's degree in medical informatics from Columbia University and a bachelor of medicine and surgery (MBBS) from Delhi University, India.

Vikram Sheshadri
Vikram Sheshadri is vice president of product management at Emedapps, Inc., where he is in charge of product lines for a healthcare IT company. There he developed a computerized patient order entry (CPOE) system, an HL7 Interface engine, scanning software, and an application to create Continuity of Care Records (CCR). He is also involved with the Illinois Community Health Record project. Sheshadri received a PhD in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with a joint appointment at Northwestern's School of Medicine and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where he developed computer systems to track responses of hemiparetic stroke patients.

W. Ken Woo
Ken Woo has 19 years of experience in the information technology industry, including 10 years in the telecommunications industry. He has given numerous talks at the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction conferences while serving his local school board district as a member of its technical advising team. He is currently a member of University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) and Educause. He received an MBA in management from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and an MS in computer science with a concentration in telecommunications from DePaul University in Chicago. He is currently the director of information technology and facilities for the School of Continuing Studies.