CDISC Adds New Board Members

CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium, Inc.) has added two directors to its board, Dr. Christopher Chute of the Mayo Clinical College of Medicine and Paula Brown Stafford of Quintiles Transnational Corp. Dr. Chute and Ms. Stafford bring a wealth of relevant experience to the CDISC board from their respective roles as professor and chair for the biomedical informatics department at the Mayo Clinical College of Medicine, and as executive vice president of global data management at Quintiles.

Ms. Stafford brings a global perspective and broad experience from her varied roles within a large CRO. Her current role is heading the globalization of the Quintiles Data Management function, where she leads a team of 1,200 people, representing $100 million investment in revenue.

“Paula’s expertise and perspective will be most valuable at this critical point in CDISC’s growth and adoption,” states Rebecca Kush, president of CDISC.

Ms. Stafford added, “To date, Quintiles has delivered nearly 200 CDISC-compliant databases on behalf of Pharma. My belief is that the key to the industry’s future is to deliver a CDISC-compliant data structure before the first patient enters a trial. The FDA supports this view and believes that CDISC is the natural leader to make this happen. I am keenly interested in bringing my expertise to the CDISC table and to help lead the vision for the pharmaceutical industry.” Ms. Stafford has accepted the position of chair of the board’s Financial Oversight Committee. She will serve the term through 2007.

Dr. Chute has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications regarding standards work in the specific areas of vocabulary and health concept representation in Health Informatics. Dr. Chute has also chaired efforts such as the Joint HL7 and SNOMED Meeting: The Boundary between Vocabulary and Information Models, NASA Vocabulary Summit (2004); ANSI Health Informatics Standards Board (HISB) (2004-2005); NIH Biomedical Computing and Health Informatics: Special Emphasis Panel (2005). Dr. Chute is currently the chair of the U.S. Delegation to the ISO Informatics Technical Committee (2007-2009). Dr. Chute will serve on the board from 2007 through 2009.

“CDISC will most certainly benefit from Dr. Chute’s invaluable expertise in the areas of terminology, information technology and standards development,” stated Ms. Kush.

The CDISC board has a total of ten directors. Two others were re-elected to serve a second three-year term for 2007-2009. Dr. Pierre-Yves Lastic, senior director, standards management and data privacy at Sanofi-Aventis, and William Rosen, executive director, external affairs, standards and support with Pfizer.