Majed Tomeh, MS, MBA

President & CEO

As president & CEO, Majed has overall responsibility for the strategic direction and operation of the company. He has built his career in technology-based service companies in the Boston area, most notably in organizations that have applied emerging technologies to distill vast amounts of data into personal, meaningful and actionable information. Beginning in 1989 as a co-founder of Individual, Inc., a pioneer in customized daily electronic news for business and healthcare professionals, he led the company’s technical and content operations through five consecutive years of doubling revenues, product expansion, and evolution of communication platforms from fax and email to groupware and the Internet. Individual became a public company in 1996, and was eventually acquired by Thomson Publishing. During 1999 and 2000, Majed was CEO of Adero, a provider of infrastructure for distributing content globally across the Internet. Under his leadership, Adero expanded from five to over 250 employees, raised over $100 million in financing, acquired two companies, and built an international network of content servers in over 100 countries. Majed has also worked for McKinsey & Co. and Analog Devices, and has consulted to a variety of technology-based companies. He is a graduate of Princeton University (BSE), Stanford University (MS), and Harvard Business School (MBA).
 

Kathy Rowell, MHA, MS

Chief operating officer & Executive Vice President

Kathy has worked in the healthcare industry for 20 years, developing expertise in a number of areas including clinical outcomes, quality management, and healthcare operations and policy. As Chief Operating Officer & Executive Vice President at QCMetrix, Kathy works closely with the entire team to provide management and direction for the company. She applies her knowledge of operations and healthcare by overseeing the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP) and as an advisor to the numerous stakeholders of the program. Kathy’s previous work at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center with the Surgical Outcomes Assessment Project (SOAP) to develop a continuous quality improvement model using risk-adjusted outcomes led her to work with the Massachusetts General Hospital where she helped to establish the Center of Clinical Effectiveness in Surgery (CCES). Kathy has also served as a consultant and advisor to the Partners Healthcare System in Boston, MA and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, OH on similar projects aimed at helping those organizations to capture, understand and implement change in their surgery departments. An author of several articles on this work and the Principle Investigator of an NIH SBIR Grant “Using Pre-Operative Variables to Predict Length of Stay,” Kathy is a highly sought-after speaker at Surgical Grand Rounds and at conferences for healthcare administrators and policymakers. Her academic credentials include two Master degrees, one in the Evaluative and Clinical Sciences from the Dartmouth Medical School, and the other in Health Administration from the University of NH.
 

Arthur W. Harvey, III, BA

Vice President of technology

Arthur has been involved with software design, development, and implementation for over 20 years with a number of companies in the Boston area. He began his career at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he filled a variety of roles including both software development and system management. Prior to joining QCMetrix, he served as Director of Clinical Development at Healthvision, Inc. and then founded a consulting practice that focused on software architecture, application deployment, and management practices for a number of healthcare software companies. Arthur received his BA degree in Economics/Computer Science from Boston College.
 

Steve Merzlak, BSCS

director of program management

Steve brings ten years of experience working with the NSQIP to his role at QCMetrix. He was the chief engineer for the NSQIP informatics structure and led the design and development of the ACSNSQIP.org website, the data collection platform used by participating medical centers in the private sector. In addition, his team created the QCMitt and SCNR Workstation productivity tools to automate and streamline the capture of surgical data and allow it to be re-purposed inside program hospitals. Steve also serves as a member of the ACS NSQIP Steering Committee. Prior to joining QCMetrix, Steve spent ten years as a principal consultant at Attunity, the leading provider of technology solutions for integrating disparate data sources, legacy and mainframe applications. The VA was a customer of Attunity and from that relationship Steve was requested to work on the private-sector NSQIP. He received his BA degree in Computer Science from the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology.
 

Craig Miller, BSEE

Director of Information Systems

Craig is responsible for the implementation of all systems infrastructure and security solutions at QCMetrix’s client sites. He has over 15 years of experience in application programming, database administration, and information systems management in the healthcare sector, with over 10 years’ experience actively working with the NSQIP program. Craig has been highly instrumental in helping NSQIP participants understand and utilize their clinical data by creating highly user-friendly online report interfaces and customized reports. Previously, at the Boston Healthcare System, he spent over 7 years working daily within the operating rooms and the intensive care unit environment, setting up for surgeries and maintaining specialized hospital information systems. Working as part of a surgical service, he provided networking, programming, database administration, and software & hardware support on an ongoing basis. At the Allocation Resource Center, he spent 3 years as an Oracle database administrator and Web specialist focused on providing custom healthcare financial reporting solutions to a national audience. Craig received his BSEE degree from the University of Vermont.
 

Janet Steeger, RN, BSN

Director, nurse Reviewer Education & development

Janet has extensive experience with the NSQIP and is responsible for the coordination of nurse training, continuing education, and day-to-day oversight of the surgical clinical nurse reviewers at all the private-sector ACS NSQIP sites. Her background makes her uniquely suited to this position assuring proper program application and data reliability. She began her career as a clinical nurse in the cardiac units of New England Deaconess Hospital and Children’s Hospital. She then joined the West Roxbury VAMC, first as a surgical research nurse and then as the surgical quality management coordinator working closely with the NSQIP program. Janet is a member of the ACS NSQIP Steering Committee and Data Definition Committee where her background and knowledge about both clinical and program matters has proved invaluable to the success of the program. Janet has also been instrumental in leveraging website technology by working with her team to create online training and learning modules for the ACS NSQIP Surgical Clinical Nurse Reviewers at participating sites. This work allows QCMetrix to monitor learning and understanding of the ACS NSQIP using quantifiable methods and data (in addition to classroom training and data audits), thereby assuring the quality of the program data. Janet received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of New Hampshire.
 

Harry Wu, PhD

Senior Technology Consultant

Harry provides technology and management consulting to QCMetrix and its clients. He draws from over 25 years of experience in the computer information industry as a technologist and an executive. After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell University, he held progressively more senior technical positions at ITT and Honeywell, developing database and knowledge base systems. He co-founded two start-ups, Individual, Inc. and MyESP.com Corp. As the Chief Scientist at Individual, he oversaw and implemented an information retrieval system for real-time news dissemination. As the VP of Engineering at MyESP.com, he managed the development of a Web-based groupware platform to support community communication and chat. Harry is the holder of two patents in knowledge-base and information-retrieval technologies. At QCMetrix, he is pursuing his latest interest in the building of healthcare applications using open-source software. In addition to the PhD from Cornell, Harry earned a BA degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.