Mark grew up in rural Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Washington U. School of Medicine, Stanford University (Medical Information Science), and Washing-ton University Olin School of Business.

He’s an internist trained in hematology oncology who was a Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean at Washington University School of Medicine. He left Washington University to become a Vice President at Express Scripts. There he had the opportunity to help create consumer web sites for over 60 million members. He also ran their Practice Patterns Science subsidiary and later became Chief Medical Officer.
He subsequently explored the real world of health care technology by joining First Consulting Group. While there he was involved in a range of engagements. The most long-standing included a large-scale quality study for Texas Health Resources and an ambitious clinical information system implementation for Allina in Minneapolis.

For the past five years, he’s been the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. Through this position he has extensive contact with students both in the Medical Center and in the Owen School of Business.

Working with the support of Governor Phil Bredesen on a five-year project funded by AHRQ and the State of Tennessee, Mark and his amazing colleagues  created a regional health information exchange involving all major providers in the Memphis area. The Exchange has comprehensive data sharing agreements and supports care for over 1,200,000 people. It has been in operation for since May of 2006. As of 2010, Mark and Vanderbilt's role have diminished. As intended, the effort is now managed entirely by its Memphis Board and services are largely provided through Informatics Corporation of America.

Mark is now focusing efforts on Vanderbilt core services modeled on evolving NHIN specifications, including a uniform approach to interactions between Vanderbilt and a range of "external" services including web portals, PHRs, remot monitoring, secure messaging, and population health reporting. This work will include incorporation of some recent advances in modeling security and access through formal computational approaches.



Follow this link for references to his publications in PubMED

• He was an editor of the “Manual of Medical Therapeutics” in 1982 - one of the largest-selling medical books in the world.
• He started working on hypertext information retrieval systems since 1986 and was on the program committee for Hypertext ‘87.
• He was involved in a large-scale data integration project in the mid 1990s that provided drug interaction alerts to pharmacists at the BJC Health System in St. Louis.
  
• As an associate dean at Washington University, he was director of the Bernard Becker Medical Library and had the good fortune of spending a lot of time with Dr. Becker.
  
• He as academic director of a health care executive MBA program at the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University.
  
• He helped found RxHub; later served on the board of SureScripts, and in the latter capacity most recently was involved in the merger of the two entities into SureScripts RxHub
• He’s led workshops and authored comprehensive reports on privacy, confidentiality, and health information exchange.
• He served as a co-chair for the State of Florida Health Information Privacy and Security (HISPC) effort and spoke at many regional meetings.
• He co-chaired the Markle Foundation’s Con-necting for Health group that developed many of the data sharing policies. Carol Diamond, David Lansky, Gerry Hinkley, and Allen Briskin played key roles. Vicki Estrin brought these policies to life in Memphis. Markle inspired all.
• He’s led workshops for a number of state-level initiatives. In 2008, he completed a workshop and authored a report proposing re-organizing the health care system for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
• Later in 2008, he led and reported on a multi-day workshop addressing reorganizing the State of New York’s approach to progressive intermittent frailty and the care of the elderly.
• He served on the Governor Phil Bredesen's eHealth Council and played a role in transitioning this council to a non-profit public-private partnership.
  
• He had the good fortune in the winter of 2009-2010 to support the NHIN Working Group at ONC.
  
• He is on the steering group for the ONC Strategic Plan.
  

He lives in Nashville, TN and St. Louis. He spends as much time as possible with his wife Cathy and his two daughters.