HHS names informatics pro Mark Roche as its CHIO

The Department of Health and Human Services now has a chief healthcare informatics officer with the appointment of Mark Roche, MD.

HHS Administrator Seema Verma announced the choice of Roche, a physician informaticist.

Roche began working this week and will be responsible for helping formulate and implement clinical and technical aspects of CMS’ interoperability strategy and the MyHealthEData initiative.

Roche has 16 years of experience in government, academic and industry sectors working on projects that covered national eHealth strategy, data modeling and semantic interoperability.



He previously was a physician advisor to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and led the design of the U.S. Interoperability Roadmap. Roche also developed components for the clinical quality measures in Stage 3 of the electronic health records Meaningful Use program.

In his biography on the healthit.gov web site, Roche is described as a strategic subject matter expert in “document structure standards, metadata standards (ISO 11179-3) and terminology standards (SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm and ICD-9/10) across several Standards and Interoperability Framework initiatives, including Structured Data Capture (SDC), EU-US eHealth Cooperation Initiative, Data Access Framework (DAF) and others.”

Roche also worked at the National Cancer Institute and as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, which included training in bioinformatics and health IT at the National Institutes of Health.

Roche also served as a co-chair of HL7 from May 2015 to May 2017.