Advisors

The Unified Code for Units of Measure was founded in 1999 by Gunther Schadow then under the supervision of Clement J. McDonald. For this reason, Gunther Schadow and Clem McDonald are ex-officio members of the UCUM Advisors. Other members of advisors have been recruited from a very small set of individuals who have over the years expressed interest and demonstrated expertise in the subject and have supported the UCUM project with their advice, advocacy, and expertise in the semantic domain of units of measures.

Jozef Aerts, PhD

Dr. Aerts has over 35 years of experience in development of technical and scientific software, especially in the area of organic and physical chemistry, and in healthcare and clinical research. He is the founder of XML4Pharma and Computer Chemistry Consultancy.

Simon Cox, PhD

Dr. Cox works on practices and standards for the publication and transfer of science data, particularly geospatial. After an early career in geophysics and mineral exploration, he moved to focus mainly on data and informatics. Through this he has engaged with many other areas of environmental science, including water resources, marine data, meteorology, soil, ecology and biodiversity. Engagement with CODATA has extended the cross-disciplinary scope still further into social science and official statistics applications. He is principal- or co-author of a number of international standards for data. His current focus is on FAIR data, linked open data, and semantic web technologies, with a particular emphasis on formalization, publication and maintenance of controlled vocabularies and related reference data. He was awarded the 2006 Gardels Medal by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and was selected to present the 2013 Leptoukh Lecture for the American Geophysical Union.

Christof Gessner, PhD

Dr. Gessner has his PhD in Physics/Chemistry and academic training in Medical Physics and Medical Informatics. For many years, Dr. Gessner held positions in hospitals and with vendors of medical devices and software. Since 2008 he is an expert consultant for medical informatics standards and terminologies, including HL7®, LOINC®. Dr. Gessner has contributed to UCUM since early 2006. He is a member of the Medical Standards Committee of DIN (the german national standardization body) and a delegate to ISO TC 215. In 2010 he has been appointed by the DIN terminology comittee as a delegate to ISO TC 12, the international authority on units of measures.

Eza Hafeza, MD

Dr. Hafeza is Director, Clinical Terminology Services and Operations for the LOINC and Health Data Standards program within Regenstrief Institute.

William A. Hess, CAPT (ret.) USPHS

Captain Hess is a Pharmacist and member and subject matter expert to (1) FDA Product Risk Ranking Team, (2) FDA Data Standards Council, (3) VA National Drug File Reference Terminology Interagency Expert Panel, (4) Federal Healthcare Information Technology Standards Organization Participation Work Group, (5) HITSP Foundations Medical Terminology Work Group, (6) Technical Advisory Group for Structured Product Labeling Indexing Contract, (7) White House Consolidated Health Informatics Medication Domain Expert Work Group, Allergy Domain Expert Work Group, Chemical Domain Expert Work Group, an (8) All five HITSP ARRA Tiger Teams. He is an FDA Liaison to the FDA/NLM Interagency Agreement for the Photography and Image Processing of Prescription Solid Dosage Form Medications, and to the USP Expert Committees on (1) Pharmaceutical Dosage Forms, (2) Nomenclature, Safety, and Labeling, and (3) Therapeutic Information and Formulary Support. He provides vocabulary and database design consultation to FDA scientific reviewers and database engineers. He serves as principal FDA scientific nomenclature representative and subject matter expert to other United States government agencies, to foreign government agencies, and to private agencies. He is responsible for developing, establishing, and implementing Agency nomenclature policy and standards as well as Agency indexing policy and standards. These standards are used worldwide in electronic submissions, electronic labeling, electronic prescribing, and the electronic health record.

Stanley M. Huff, MD

Dr. Huff is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Graphite Health and a Professor (Clinical) of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. He is board certified in Clinical Pathology. He has worked in the area of medical vocabularies and medical database architecture for the past 30+ years. He is currently a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, a co-chair of the LOINC Committee, and a co-chair of the HL7 Clinical Information Modeling Initiative (CIMI). He is also the Chair of Logica (formerly the Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC)) and the Chair of the FHIR Foundation. He is the former CMIO at Intermountain Healthcare, a former member of the ONC HIT Standards Committee, and a former member of NCVHS. He is also a previous Chair (twice) of Health Level Seven (HL7). He teaches a course in medical vocabulary and data exchange standards in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah.

Rob McClure, MD

An active clinical informatician for over forty years, Dr. McClure practiced Internal Medicine and Pediatrics before devoting his career to clinical informatics. He is an expert on clinical modeling, and the development and use of clinical terminologies within clinical systems using international standards. He is President of MD Partners, Inc., a health care information modeling and terminology consulting company that is actively involved in the development of clinical decision making and quality assessment standards in use by US governmental agencies, including the Office of the Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

Clement J. McDonald, MD

Dr. McDonald is a legend in medical informatics, one of the few pioneers of the field in the late 1960. He is the scientific "father" of the Regenstrief Institute where he has been relentlessly pushing an agenda of improving health care through information technology. He has built the largest and longest running electronic medical record system which is now serving the entire state of Indiana. To pursue these goals, Dr. McDonald had realized the need for medical information standards. He is the father of ASTM 1238, the first standard for communicating clinical and laboratory measurement results, and the clinical observation reporting and ordering components of HL7. Dr. McDonald also took on the challenge to create a terminology system for clinical observation results, the Logical Observation Identifiers, Names, and Codes (LOINC) while cooperating with other pioneers in this field world wide. Today Dr. McDonald is director of the Lister Hill Center of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Dr. McDonald is a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) division VII sub-committee for Nomenclature of Properties and Units (NPU) where he currently works with the world’s experts on the second revised edition of the IUPAC "Silver Book", the authority in the field of metrology in medicine. Dr. McDonald has been a vital supporter of the work that led to the Unified Code for Units of Measure.

Anil Patel, BSc (Hons) CTSS (he/him), HICA (CHIMA)

Anil Patel is a highly skilled Standards Specialist at Infoway, a renowned organization in the field of healthcare technology and standards. With a wealth of experience and expertise in his domain, Anil plays a pivotal role in shaping and implementing industry standards for healthcare information systems. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and a certificate in Computer Information systems, Anil possesses a strong foundation in technology and its application within the healthcare sector. His passion for advancing healthcare through innovative solutions led him to specialize in standards development, where he could contribute to the interoperability and seamless exchange of health information. In 1999 he authored a white paper to support LOINC and UCUM adoption as the Pan Canadian Standard for Laboratories. Throughout his career, Anil has demonstrated an exceptional understanding of healthcare standards, such as HL7, DICOM, and FHIR. He actively collaborates with various stakeholders, including government bodies, healthcare providers, and technology vendors, to establish robust and harmonized standards that enhance patient care and enable efficient data exchange.

Marjorie Rallins, DPM

Dr. Rallins is the Executive Director for the LOINC and Health Data Standards program within Regenstrief Institute.

Gunther Schadow, MD, PhD

Dr. Schadow has created the intellectual foundation of the Unified Code for Units of Measure while working on his PhD project in the interoperability of clinical laboratory results in 1996 at the Free University Berlin. In 1998 Dr. Schadow joined the Regenstrief Institute to work on Dr. McDonald’s team where he refined the work on the units of measure terminology and eventually released the UCUM as a public specification. Dr. Schadow had been instrumental for the design and penetration of many of the newer HL7 version 3 specifications, both foundational standards, as the Reference Information Model (RIM) and HL7 data types specification, both of which have become ISO standards, as well as applied standards, such as the HL7 Structured Product Labeling (SPL) and Common Product Model, and more recently the HL7 Chemical Substances specification standard. These standards have revolutionized the way that drug knowledge is maintained and shared in the U.S.A., and have become a core part of ISO international standards on the identification of medicinal products. Dr. Schadow is a member of the IUPAC division VII sub-committe on Nomenclature of Properties and Units (NPU).

Daniel J. Vreeman, DPT

Dr. Daniel Vreeman is a physical therapist, biomedical informatician, and expert in health data standards. His work aims to create a global health ecosystem where data is available with open standards that unlock the potential for information systems and applications to improve health decision-making and care. Dr. Vreeman is the Chief Standards Development Officer at HL7 International where he leads the development of standards to advance health data interoperability. Dr. Vreeman is an interoperability expert who has developed internationally adopted health data standards, implemented them in multi-institutional health IT systems, evaluated their use, and provided strategic advice to interoperability initiatives of numerous U.S. federal agencies and national eHealth efforts in several other countries.