Impact Statements
J. Peter Geerlofs, MD
Former Chief Medical Officer, Allscripts Healthcare Solutions
"As a company dedicated to providing clinical software, connectivity and decision support solutions that physicians use to improve quality of care, Allscripts welcomes the Common Framework's guidance on how to share health information between physicians and patients while maintaining the trust of all parties. The Connecting for Health approach has allowed us to work collaboratively with a broad spectrum of health care leaders - consumer advocates, insurers, employers, government agencies - to develop a set of policies and an overall architecture that helps inform our own product development activities while catalyzing connectivity solutions in our industry as a whole."
While serving as Chief Medical Officer for Allscripts, Dr. Geerlofs was responsible for the vision and direction of Allscripts' Touchworks ambulatory electronic health record. Dr. Geerlofs was a Board Certified family physician in Washington State for 20 years and served 10 years as the public health officer for a large rural county. During the early 1980s he started lecturing on the benefits of the EMR and in 1986 took a sabbatical to lead the design team that created the Depart of Defense's CPOE system, currently used in more than 500 military hospitals and clinics worldwide. In 1993 Dr. Geerlofs founded Medifor Inc., a medical software company focused on innovative alternatives to the EMR that busy practitioners could readily adopt. Medifor was acquired by Allscripts in 2000, where Dr. Geerlofs was key in setting the company's vision of the world class electronic health system vendor Allscripts has become.
