Before joining the Office of the Director at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Dr. Fitzmaurice was Director, Center for Information Technology, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research until March 1998. He joined the Public Health Service in 1987 as Director of the National Center for Health Services Research and Health Care Technology Assessment, coming from the Health Care Financing Administration where he was Acting Director, Office of Research. Previously, as Branch Chief in the Office of Research, Dr. Fitzmaurice directed the development of Medicare's Prospective Payment System. He received his Ph.D. degree in economics in 1972 from the University of Maryland. Dr. Fitzmaurice has separate undergraduate degrees from St. Joseph's College in mathematics and in economics. He was an adjunct Associate Professor in the Howard University Graduate School of Business from 1972 to 1977 and the University College Graduate School, University of Maryland at College Park, from 1982 to 1987.

Dr. Fitzmaurice is active nationally and internationally in encouraging the uniformity and computerization of health care information to improve patient safety, the quality of patient care, and public health policy decisions. In 2000 he received the Elmer Gabrielli Award from the American Society for Testing and Materials, Committee E31, for his dedication to and achievements in national health data standards. In 1999 Dr. Fitzmaurice received the Future of Health Technology Award and was also elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.

In 1993 Dr. Fitzmaurice served on the White House Health Reform Task Force, Working Groups on Information Systems and on Administrative Simplification, which made recommendations to the Task Force on the use of information technology in health care. He has represented AHRQ as a member of the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) Committee on Applications and Technology. The IITF released his paper "Health Care and the National Information Infrastructure" in Putting the Information Infrastructure to Work (May 1994), which presents the vision of how NII can benefit the health care sector.

Currently, Dr. Fitzmaurice advises the Director of AHRQ, develops health information technology research programs at AHRQ, co-chairs the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Information and Cross-Cutting Implementation Team that provides oversight for developing the health data standards requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (Public Law 104-191). HIPAA calls for the Secretary of DHHS to adopt national patient care data standards for selected electronic health care transactions. He is AHRQ's liaison to the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and lead staff member for the working group that prepared the congressionally mandated report on standards needed for patient medical record information and its electronic transmission. This report was sent to the Secretary of DHHS on July 6, 2000, and is available at http://ncvhs.hhs.gov/hipaa000706.pdf. Dr. Fitzmaurice's 2000 article on HIPAA in The Physician Executive, "What Physician Executives Need to Know about HIPAA," may be found at http://www.ahrq.gov/data/hipaa1.htm. He is a member of the DHHS Privacy Working Group that produced the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Dr. Fitzmaurice is lead staff member on the DHHS Secretary's Council on Private Sector Initiatives to Improve the Security, Safety, and Quality of Health Care (created December 2001) and manages AHRQ's Patient Safety Health Care Information Technology Data Standards Program, which has a budget of $10 million in 2004.

Dr. Fitzmaurice, with Karen Adams and John Eisenberg, published "Three Decades of Research on Computer Applications in Health Care: Medical Informatics Support at the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research," Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2002;9:144-160.

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