Hi, I’m Sam.
I help medical societies, life-sciences, data analytics providers, and federal health agencies turn clinical data into real-world evidence platforms, patient registries, and digital products that change the world.
For over 20 years, I’ve been the person organizations call when they need a registry built from the ground up, messy clinical data made usable, or a data strategy that actually meets their goals.
What I actually do
Registries & real-world evidence
I design patient registries and RWE programs end to end: conducting environmental scans and market assessments, developing air-tight business cases and plans, creating data models, selecting technology platforms, building governance structures, and managing programs and teams.
Real-world data & OMOP-CDM
I work hands-on with EHR, claims, and registry data, including using the OMOP Common Data Model, identify cohorts, design e-phenotypes, analyze the data and present results using data visualization tools.
Quality measurement
I’ve built CMS-approved quality measures and physician recognition programs from scratch, including the first ever in clinical pathology. The measures I’ve developed have been incorporated into payment programs including the QPP.
Data standards & governance
I lead the less glamorous work too: developing common data elements, HIPAA-compliant data sharing, and governance policies for trustworthy, secure data.
A little about me
I started my career building a national pediatric ICU registry, from working with clinicians to define research data elements to coding and delivering complex data collection and analytics software. I knew then that I was hooked on registries and RWD.
Since then I’ve worked with over 25 healthcare organizations, from medical societies to federal agencies to life-sciences companies, always on some version of the same problem: how do you build clinical data platforms that are trustworthy, usable, cost-effective, and aligned with mission and market needs?
These days I split my time running Breakthrough Healthcare and finishing a master’s in Applied Informatics at Johns Hopkins.
Some folks I’ve worked with
American Society of Hematology, American College of Cardiology, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, American Gastroenterological Association, American Society for Clinical Pathology, and the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis.
Recent publications
I recently published in Blood and Blood Advances on real-world data infrastructure, and led the first international data standard for venous thromboembolism research, now accepted by the National Library of Medicine.