Office of Burden Reduction and Health Informatics

Mary Greene, M.D. – Director
Stella Mandl - Deputy Director

Customer-Focused Research Group – Suzanne M. Martin-Devroye, Director
Governance and Impact Analysis Group – Samantha Richardson, Director
Health Informatics and Interoperability Group – Alex Mugge, Director and Deputy Chief Health Informatics Officer
Emerging Innovations Group – Merri-Ellen James, Director
National Standards Group – Christine Gerhardt, Director; Daniel Kalwa, Deputy Director

Functional Statement

• Serves as CMS’ focal point and champion for burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability, and engages internal and external customers to inform solutions.
• Provides an accountable and sustainable network of resources and services to support efforts across the agency to reduce administrative burden for health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans and clearing houses; advance interoperability across the health system; and improve customer experience.
• Convenes and manages executive-level Steering Committees to inform and prioritize burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability activities and initiatives and to foster collaboration and coordination across programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and Marketplace.
• Leads, coordinates, or supports cross-agency projects to eliminate overly burdensome and unnecessary regulations; simplify, clarify, or remove sub-regulatory guidance; and achieve greater efficiency in CMS operations that affect the day-to-day activities of health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearing houses.
• Leads, coordinates, or supports cross-agency projects to advance the exchange of health information among health care providers, clinicians, beneficiaries, health plans, and clearing houses to achieve operational efficiencies and make data available to inform evidence-based decisions.
• Establishes recurrent and ongoing mechanisms to obtain customer insights and feedback, such as requests for information, listening sessions, onsite engagements, and social media analysis.
• Establishes a Human-Centered Design strategy for the agency’s burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability initiatives and provides resources and services to support implementation.
• Works collaboratively across CMS to increase the visibility of and engage external stakeholders in CMS’ burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability initiatives.
• Maintains a repository of burden reduction, national standards, and interoperability efforts and accomplishments across CMS.
• Uses qualitative and quantitative methods to assess impact on customer experience.
• Works to infuse a burden-reduction, interoperability, customer-focused mindset throughout CMS.