Dr. Gary Marchionini, dean at the School of Information and Library Science and Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been appointed to serve on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) Health Information Technology (HIT) Report Workgroup.

The PCAST Workgroup is under the auspices of the Federal Advisory Committees of the HIT Standards Committee and the HIT Policy Committee that advise David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for Health IT.

The charge of the PCAST Workgroup centers around the PCAST HIT report released in December 2010 which is entitled, "Report to the President Realizing the Full Potential of Health Information Technology to Improve Healthcare for Americans: The Path Forward." 
  
"With the release of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) Report the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) of HIT has received substantial input and comment. The charge of the PCAST Workgroup is to help ONC synthesize and analyze the public comment and input to the PCAST report, discuss the implications of the report on current ONC strategies, assess the feasibility and impact of the PCAST report on ONC programs, and elaborate on how these recommendations could be integrated into the ONC strategic framework."

The 18 member Workgroup will prepare a report for the ONC in April, 2011.

In addition to this national Workgroup, Marchionini has served on several committees including the Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), a Committee that reviews and advises the NLM and the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Marchionini specializes in information seeking in electronic environments, human-computer interaction, digital libraries, information design and information policy. His current interests include interfaces that support information seeking and information retrieval; usability of personal health records; multimedia browsing strategies; digital libraries; information architecture; personal identity in cyberspace; and evaluation of interactive media, especially for learning and teaching.


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Wanda Monroe
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