Brian Ahier

Brian Ahier works as Director of Standards and Government Affairs at Medicity, a Healthagen business inside Aetna. Brian was the Health IT Evangelist at Mid-Columbia Medical Center for eleven years and also President of Gorge Health Connect, Inc. (GHC) a health information exchange organization in the Columbia River Gorge where they implemented one of the first Direct Project pilots. He served a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon for four years. He also served on the Board of Mid-Columbia Council of Governments, and Q-Life, an intergovernmental agency providing broadband capacity to the region, He as well as the Board for the Oregon Chapter of HIMSS

Brian helped develop the Oregon strategic and operational plans for implementing State-Level HIE under the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement. After the plan was approved by the ONC he was appointed by the State of Oregon Health Information Technology Oversight Council (HITOC) as Chairperson of the Technology Workgroup responsible for developing a framework and providing input for technology goals, including deliverables and objectives, standards, and definition of central services.

Brian has worked extensively on the Direct Project since its inception working on several workgroups and teams. In a previous contract with ONC he worked with numerous HIE grantees implementing the Direct Project to assist in shaping their strategies, developing vendor requirements and mapping a strategy for statewide implementation to support Stage 1 meaningful use. He helped plan and implement a very successful Direct Project boot camp with ONC and Deloitte staff, and also contacted with the ONC to provide support to State HIE Grantees involved in the Consumer Innovation Challenge.

He has written for Government Health IT, Healthcare IT News, and iHealthBeat and he blogs at Healthcare, Technology and Government 2.0; as well as O'Reilly Radar. He also frequently provides industry updates on Twitter.