Mariann Yeager
Title: CEO
Organization: The Sequoia Project
Years in HIT: 25
Previous Positions/Background: Nationwide Health Information Network Initiatives, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology; Certification Program Director, CCHIT; Vice President, Healthcare Practice, TruArx, Inc.; President, Emerson Strategic Group, Inc.; Vice President, Industry & Government Relations, Presideo, Inc.; Director, Payer Services, ENVOY Corporation (now Emdeon); Senior Analyst, CIGNA Healthcare.
Significant Achievements: Yeager currently leads The Sequoia Project, the non-profit home of one of the largest health data sharing networks in America, eHealth Exchange, and the leading, national-level interoperability framework for trusted exchange between and among networks, Carequality.
In 2016, Carequality and CommonWell Health Alliance announced an agreement to enable broader health information exchange
She launched and ran the first EHR certification program, the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, which laid the groundwork for EHR certification requirements under the HITECH Act.
Yeager facilitated the merging of two national insurance claims clearinghouses while working for Envoy, now Emdeon, in its merger with NEIC.
Impact on HIT: Yeager has been a leading figure in expanding both health IT interoperability capabilities and connectivity capacity nationwide. Her early work in leading the payer network operations division for the country’s largest electronic claims clearinghouse (now Change Healthcare) gave her a thorough grounding in the challenges of electronic data interchange, and she has spent her career embracing those complexities and helping to surmount them in order to improve care coordination and quality.
Under Yeager’s leadership, the Office of the National Coordinator’s Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) has evolved into the non-profit eHealth Exchange, a national health data sharing network that supports more than 109 million patients, including active duty, veterans, and their families. This network grew by 40% just last year, connecting hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies, dialysis centers, and other sites of care with four federal agencies (Centers of Medicaid and Medicare, Department of Defense, Social Security Administration, and Veterans Health Administration).
Yeager also led the successful launch of Carequality which is now interconnecting data sharing networks using a national-level, consensus-driven trusted exchange framework approach, such as called for in the 21st Century Cures Act. After two years in development, Carequality was deployed in 2016 at unprecedented speed for an industry often criticized by outsiders for not moving fast enough. In less than six months, more than 210,000 physicians across more than 600 hospitals and 17,000 clinics were enabled to share data across the technological and geographic boundaries of their existing networks. The various activities of the Sequoia Project are tackling tough issues like patient matching and improving the quality and completeness of clinical data.