Team Member Bio

Jeff Hummel, MD, MPH
Medical Director for Health Informatics at Qualis Health
jeffh@qualishealth.org

Professional Background
Jeff started his medical career as a solo rural doctor in the Palouse, and quickly figured out medicine is not something he wanted to do by himself, although he loved the rural lifestyle. After a couple of transition years working emergency rooms in Southeast Alaska, he settled down for 13 years at Group Health where he learned the basics of medical homes. While at Group Health, he got an MPH and spent time working in Mexico with the University of Washington International Health Program and in remote Alaskan villages with UW MEDEX Northwest. He left Group Health in 1997 for the UW to start up their neighborhood clinic systems using an EHR, where he pioneered early work or quality reporting from an EHR. He moved over to Qualis six years ago to help with the DOQ-IT project, which was CMS’s first effort to use Quality Improvement Organizations to assist primary care providers install EHRs.

Motivation
 “Believe it or not, I don’t think EHRs are the be all and end all, but I think they are such a huge improvement over paper charts that it is essential to learn how to work with them. There is no way we are going to get a handle on quality and patient safety issues without EHRs. On the other hand, the fact that the user interface is very complicated, EHRs don’t communicate well with each other and patients can’t easily see or correct the information in them, are all major issues that will probably be addressed at some point in the future by having patients keep their own personal medical records and sharing their information with us when they come to the office. The most important thing about the stage we’re at right now with EHR adoption is that it forces those of us in the health professions to question our assumptions about how we manage information and how we provide care.”

Personal
Jeff grew up in Iowa City, Iowa and moved to Seattle in the mid 1960s to attend the University of Washington (where all three of his degrees are from). Other than relatively brief periods in Massachusetts and the Palouse, he has been in Seattle most of his adult life. In his spare time, Jeff enjoys cooking, gardening, bicycling, hiking, and reading. His wife is a professor at the UW School of Dentistry and his daughter is a performing artist in the Bay Area and his son will finish college in 2012, and is concentrating on Asian studies.