Tomorrow's leaders in health promotion are being educated at American University today.

 

Dr. Michael McDonald is a doctor of public health with a specialization in health policy and administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a dual specialty Department of Health and Social Sciences masters (MPH) in planning and policy and health education with a focus on communications and computing from U.C. Berkeley. He completed an honors B.A. degree in an interdisciplinary study of medicine at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. McDonald is president of Global Health Initiatives, Inc., chairman of the board of Windom Health Enterprises (HealthCentral.com), past chairman of the IEEE medical technology policy committee for the United States, past director of Health and Telecommunications for the Koop Foundation, Inc., past chairman of Communications and Computer Applications in Public Health, and a member of several corporate boards. Dr. McDonald has been engaged in the design and execution of several health software and health information systems projects over the past fifteen years. In 1986, he designed and implemented one of the first interactive media distribution of personal health information into the home and the workplace via ISDN and videotex.

Dr. McDonald received the "Future of Health Technology Award" at the MIT Media Labs in September 1998. His pioneering work spans several fields, including ground-breaking work in consumer-empowered, wellness-oriented health systems, the general public / health information interface, health information infrastructure, evidence-based medicine repositories, decision support systems, knowledge management process, and health-oriented community networking. He has published and lectured extensively in these areas. He has coordinated several professional meetings on health information infrastructure (e.g., 1992 and 1993 National Health Information Infrastructure Plenaries, Healthy Cities Communications Toolbox Summit), provided expertise to the White House, and given testimony on these issues to several congressional subcommittees over the past few years. For three and a half years, he oversaw The Koop Foundation Inc. a non-profit organization with expertise in health, technology, and health information infrastructure.

Dr. McDonald has worked for numerous government agencies (e.g., FDA, NCI, OMB, OASH, ODPHP, NIST, NTIA, OTA, CDC, NSF) on projects related to health promotion, health information systems, and the social impact of the information infrastructure. He has been a member of a National Academy of Sciences planning committee on the national health information infrastructure. He has supervised several health system projects for corporations, cities, counties, hospitals, and insurance companies.

Dr. McDonald is involved in policy development regarding the health information infrastructure on state, national, and international levels. He has helped to draft language for Congressional bills (e.g., Chairman Boucher's H.R. 1757: High Performance Computing and Networking Act, Congressman LaRocco's H.R. 3070: Rural Health and Education Infrastructure Act). For several years, he has been engaged in many key projects in the public and private sectors related to health system reengineering and the national information infrastructure initiative (information superhighways). During the later part of the 1990s, he was recognized as one of the most influential figures in furthering telehealth and telemedicine.

In his work at the Koop Foundation, Inc., under Dr. C. Everett Koop's chairmanship, Dr. McDonald managed the HII Consortium, a group of approximately 110 key leaders from the health sector, computing, telecommunications, employers, and consumer groups, which helped establish some of the fundamental policies and principles of the HII (Health Information Infrastructure) in the United States. He was the principal investigator on two large research and development efforts funded by NIST and two consortia of private sector companies: 1) a $30 million HII Toolset R&D project focused on business process reengineering tools; and 2) the $20 million HOLON (Health Object Library Online) R&D project focused on building a middleware architecture with a health object repository and intelligent agents to enable reuse of objects and rapid development of interoperable tools and applications.

Dr. McDonald has been a consultant in developing a design for the health information infrastructure in Africa through the auspices of the World Health Organization, the United Nations Outer Space Agency, and the European Space Agency. For the past few years, he has been working with the Pan American Health Organization, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Health Organization to help develop an extensible and scaleable health information infrastructure for the Western Hemisphere through a plan for National Collaborating Centers and Model Centers throughout North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Dr. McDonald's primary attention today is going toward development of virtual health management systems, health decision support systems, and cross-media health empowerment.
Last Updated: December 10, 2001