Wellness Solutions Working Group

Doug McClure

Corporate Manager for Technology & Operations at the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare

Partners HealthCare

Douglas J. McClure is Corporate Manager for Technology Services of Partners Telemedicine, a division of Partners Healthcare that is applying communications technology and online resources to improve access and delivery of quality patient care. Partners Telemedicine pursues its mission by working with the Harvard Medical School-affiliated teaching hospitals, including Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals.

Doug received his Masters in International Management from the University of Denver. Prior to joining Partners Healthcare, he built his career by consulting to leading high-tech, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services companies. In these roles he established himself as a recognized leader at managing and delivering complex software and system solutions that supported new product development. His ongoing research focuses on user-centric system design and the user interface as a mechanism to overcome barriers to new technology and process adoption.

Overseeing telemedicine business operations and technology research and development, Doug is responsible for managing ongoing research programs at Partners Telemedicine. These R&D programs are focused on helping reduce the barriers between patients and clinicians through the use of simple, accessible technologies, such as the Internet, cell phones and digital cameras.

Doug is currently the Chair of the American Telemedicine Association Technology Special Interest Group, the co-chair of the Health Cluster in the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and a member of the Technology Working Group for the Continua Health Alliance. He is also a member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and the Project Management Institute. Doug is a frequent lecturer on connected health and telemedicine.

Doug lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.

Michael McGarry

Director, Engagements & Prototypes for Transformational Development

Ascension Health

Mr. McGarry serves as the Director, Engagements & Prototypes for Transformational Development, Ascension Health's internal innovation center, which is building the next platforms for healthcare delivery in the United States by taking non-traditional approaches to traditional problems facing healthcare. In this role, Mr. McGarry is responsible for the evaluation of technologies and development of new business models focusing on how to meet health-related needs in the future in a way that extends beyond hospitals and clinics.

He joined the company in 2008 with over 14 years experience in the health care industry developing innovative programs and medical devices from prototype through FDA approval within small start-up organizations and Fortune 500 medical companies. Prior to joining Ascension Health, Mr. McGarry worked with Alere Medical managing the design, development and launch of a custom remote patient monitoring system for patients with chronic conditions such as congestive heart failure, COPD and diabetes. Prior to his work with Alere Medical, Mr. McGarry was responsible for the design, development and clinical evaluation of numerous therapeutic cardiovascular products and directed physician training for and market evaluation of products in both the US and Europe. Mr. McGarry has a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University and has several published patents and publications.

Vice Chair

Brigitte Piniewski, MD

Director of BioWellness Research

Oregon Medical Laboratories

Dr. Brigitte Piniewski is the Director of BioWellness Research at Oregon Medical Laboratories and Vice-Chair of the Continua Health Alliance, Wellness Solutions Working Group. She earned her medical degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada and completed her internship at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. Dr. Piniewski is a primary care specialist who has several years of international experience, including both the US and Canada.

Although most of Dr. Piniewski's career has involved direct clinical care, her more recent role is as a health trends and strategy analyst for Oregon Medical Laboratories. She has a full-time commitment to researching the clinical utility of integrated approaches to optimizing health across populations.

Dr Piniewski is skilled in connecting expert insights from the fields of clinical medicine, scientific research, corporate wellness, and high-tech innovation to demonstrate the alignments that ultimately optimize models of sustainable population health. The internet has launched the science of mass participation and today technology is poised to enable and amplify high yield health behaviors across large diverse groups in sustainable ways.

Corporate health investment strategies struggle to become value-based, yet objectively quantifying current and future health benefit secondary to health investment remains a challenge. Redefining the instructional models of health and care to facilitate participatory mechanisms objectively tracking and delivering future health benefit will allow employers and governments to link dollars invested to future cost savings across large populations.

Dr Piniewski was the principle author of the Continua Health Alliance white paper "Connected Personal Health 2015" a future vision of technology-enabled pro-active preventive health management. This paper has been converted to support US, UK, EU and Japanese audiences and received the Continua Key Contributor award in 2008.