ONC Names Mostashari National Coordinator for HIT

Farzad Mostashari, MD, has been named National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, effective immediately. He replaces David Blumenthal, MD, who is returning to Harvard University after leading Office for the past two years, the Department of Health and Human Services announced.

Mostashari joined the Office of the National Coordinator in July 2009, serving as deputy national coordinator for the office, which is within the Department of Health and Human Services, said ONC in a media release.

Before that, Mostashari served at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as assistant commissioner for the Primary Care Information Project, where he helped adopt prevention-oriented HIT used by more than 1,500 providers in underserved communities, ONC said.

Mostashari also led the NYC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics and an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded project that focused on quality measurement at the point of care. Before that he established the Bureau of Epidemiology Services at the NYC Department of Health, charged with providing epidemiologic and statistical expertise and data for decision making to the health department, ONC said.

Trained at the Harvard School of Public Health and Yale Medical School, internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, Mostashari completed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service.

Mostashari was among the first developers of real-time electronic disease surveillance systems and acted as a lead investigator in the outbreaks of West Nile Virus and anthrax in New York City, ONC said.