Physician in Washington DC and national speaker on ICD-10 coding preparation. He has spent the last two years travelling across the US, training physician groups on the coding conversion to ICD-10. He is one of a small number of US physicians recognized as an official “ICD-10 Trainers”, approved by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA – The certifying agency for hospital medical records directors).
Dr. Freeman brings a unique and diverse educational and professional background to his work on health care reform in the US. A graduate of Harvard University, he became a Harvard International Fellow, studying health care delivery systems in Europe in the 1980’s. He then went on to obtain his MD degree at Stanford University Medical School, followed by an internal medicine residency at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. He then came to Washington, DC and obtained a Master’s in Public Policy (MPP), as part of an Ethics & Health Policy Fellowship in the Clinical Economics Research Unit at Georgetown University. Since then, he has enjoyed medical director and other leadership roles in both public and private hospitals. Dr. Freeman has also enjoyed leadership roles in the American Medical Association and on local health committees in the nation’s capital. His interest in coding and clinical documentation started with his federal service, as a Senior Medical Advisor in the Office of Health Information Technology & Quality, under the US Department of Health & Human Services.
For the last 20 years, Dr. Freeman has been committed to understanding how to improve health care delivery in the US. He has a graduate certificate in Health Information Technology from George Washington University, in Washington, DC. He uses that training to pursue a special interest in physician documentation issues, related to electronic health records, voice-recognition technology and computer-assisted coding. He currently works as a Regional Medical Director for JA Thomas & Associates (now part of Nuance Communications, Inc.).