More Personnel Changes as Murphy Leaves ONC

Judy Murphy, R.N., chief nursing officer and director of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, is leaving to become chief nursing officer at IBM Healthcare Global Business Services.


Judy Murphy, R.N., chief nursing officer and director of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, is leaving to become chief nursing officer at IBM Healthcare Global Business Services.

Murphy has served at ONC since December 2011 when she came on board as deputy national coordinator for programs and policies. She previously had a long nursing career at Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin that included 25 years of experience in health informatics. Other nurses at ONC will split chief nursing officer duties until a new CNO is named.

Murphy told a general session last week at AHIMA’s annual conference in San Diego that financial penalties—in the form of lower Medicare reimbursement for failure to become meaningful users of EHRs—will start “kicking in” in 2015. Over time, she said the penalties to providers could yield savings to the federal government of up to $6 billion.

With former ONC chief medical officer Jacob Reider, M.D., now deputy national coordinator, John White, M.D., from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will act in a part-time capacity as acting CMO and interim leader of the Office of Clinical Quality and Safety during a search for a permanent replacement. White leads health information technology initiatives at AHRQ.

Andy Gettinger, M.D., CMIO and associate dean for clinical informatics at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, will join ONC on a full-time basis to lead the OCQS team that covers patient safety initiatives.

ONC also announced recently that Doug Fridsma, M.D., chief science officer, is leaving his post in November to become president and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association.