Meet Lisa Lewis Person
Ms. Lisa A. Lewis Person has dedicated over 24 years of her life in service to the American people, with half of her federal career serving in the senior executive service (SES). Her career has centered around helping the American people when they are most in need and building the leaders of tomorrow. Ms. Person has established and transformed government organizations, managed, and mentored hundreds of federal workers, directed the work of hundreds of contractors, implemented new programs, and led teams in overseeing billions in federal dollars.
She has a proven record of leading individuals and organizations to optimal performance by reducing costs, increasing transparency, building partnerships, improving employee morale, decreasing service delivery time, enhancing the overall quality of services, and prioritizing outstanding service to the American people.
As the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Ms. Person spearheaded national health IT programs that have significantly advanced the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), incentivized healthcare providers to implement technology that enhances care quality, promoted interoperability, emphasized patient- centered care to empower providers and individuals by providing them with tools to access, exchange, and use health data, fostered greater patient engagement, and spurred innovation to improve public health outcomes. Ms. Person created a grants management office from the ground up. She awarded and managed over $1.7 B in grants, critical to transforming the U.S. healthcare system by digitizing healthcare. Her extraordinary leadership of these programs led to changing the U.S. healthcare system from a paper-based care delivery system to an electronic one. Advancements such as patient portals, care summaries at the end of patient visits, receiving test results more quickly, and health applications available on smartphones are results of Ms.
Person’s work.
She established national health IT workforce programs, including the Public Health Informatics and Technology Workforce Program which is training over 5,000 public health and informatics experts across the country and building capacity across U.S. Universities. Additionally, Ms. Person partnered with governments worldwide to establish the Global Digital Health Partnership (GDHP), a 40-country initiative that facilitates worldwide collaboration and knowledge-sharing in the design and delivery of digital health services. She also lead global cybersecurity policy efforts, including a global security by-design toolkit that includes a model security notice to outline cybersecurity requirements for health IT designers and purchasers and Guidance for Medical Device Cybersecurity to require transparency regarding the security protocols built into health IT products. Her remarkable efforts are increasing cybersecurity knowledge and readiness in the global healthcare sector. She has presented regarding the importance of international collaboration in digital health at the United Nations General Assembly and is the driving force behind critical collaborative efforts in health IT.
Prior to her work in health IT, Ms. Person was the Acting Assistant Administrator for the Grant Programs Directorate (GPD) at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In this role, she was responsible for the programmatic and financial management of $3 billion in national security grant programs. She also had responsibility for the financial oversight for over
$50 billion across 50 programs. She merged three government offices, over 200 contracts, 20,000 grants, 200 employees, 60 contractors, and three grants management systems into one directorate to form GPD. Her work enabled the effective management of national grant programs designed to build, sustain and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate terrorism and other high-consequence disasters and emergencies.
Ms. Person has now joined the private sector as one of the Vice Presidents of the nation’s largest network of independent primary care.