"There are many things for a state Health Care Commission to love about Connecting for Health. Its issues are cutting edge, and its reports move the field by developing both public policies and technical solutions. It takes an area of controversy or uncertainty, adds broad input and expertise, and emerges with a useful document and near consensus. Most interestingly, it brings diverse stakeholders with diverging interests together - and ends up with substantive documents rather than mealy-mouthed consensus statements. The Framework - particularly the policy statements - have played a vital role in our state's deliberations about health information exchanges. Finally, Connecting for Health is relentlessly centered on the patient/consumer - as both our health care systems and our health information systems must be."
Rex Cowdry serves as Executive Director of the Maryland Health Care Commission. He previously served as Associate Director of the White House National Economic Council, where he worked on a range of health policy issues, including health information technology, health savings accounts, and health insurance tax credits.
He graduated from Yale College in 1968, earned M.D. and Master of Public Health degrees from Harvard, and completed a residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He joined the research staff of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1976. Over the course of the next two decades, he conducted clinical research on mood disorders and personality disorders, served as the NIMH Clinical Director, chaired the Medical Board of the NIH Clinical Center, and directed the NIMH Neuropsychiatric Research Hospital. From 1994 to 1996, he was the Acting Director of NIMH.
Since leaving the NIH, he has served as Senior Scientific Advisor to the American Association of Health Plans, focusing particularly on economic and public policy issues in health plan coverage of clinical research; as Medical Director and Deputy Executive Director for Research of NAMI, a grassroots advocacy organization of individuals with serious mental illnesses and their families; and as Consultant to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
