[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 100 (Tuesday, June 13, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Page S3452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO BETSY HUMPHREYS
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, as a Member of the Senate who supports
efforts to build support for biomedical research and improved public
health, I would like to pay tribute to a great public servant and the
first woman and first librarian to lead the National Library of
Medicine, NLM, the world's largest biomedical library and a part of the
National Institutes of Health. Ms. Humphreys recently announced that
she will retire at the end of June after 44 years of extraordinary
leadership and distinguished public service.
On May 9, the board of regents of the National Library of Medicine
approved and presented the following resolution to congratulate,
commend, and thank Betsy Humphreys for her 44 years of service to the
NLM. I would like to share that resolution with my colleagues and join
the NLM board of regents in paying tribute to Betsy Humphreys, a public
servant who has had a profound and lasting impact on the NLM, the
United States, and the global community.
I ask unanimous consent to have the text of the resolution printed in
the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Ms. Betsy L. Humphreys has served NLM, the United States,
and the global community with distinction since 1973,
culminating in her appointment as the NLM Deputy Director in
2005, a post she continues to occupy today, and serving as
NLM Acting Director from April 1, 2015 to August 14, 2016--
the first woman and first librarian to lead the Library.
In a career that could be called one long highlight reel,
she directed the groundbreaking Unified Medical Language
System project, which produces knowledge sources to support
advanced processing, retrieval, and integration of
information from disparate electronic information sources,
and which is used around the world. In the process, she
developed unique knowledge and experience with the content
and format of many biomedical terminologies, health
vocabularies, and clinical classifications that would serve
her well in all endeavors to follow.
She was a key contributor to interagency efforts to advance
standardization of electronic health data, which resulted in
the development, promotion, and implementation of mechanisms
for designating US standards for health data exchange. She
was also a major contributor to the Federal regulation
setting the standards for use in electronic interchange of
administrative health data.
Taking a broader view, she led US government efforts to
remove major barriers to the use of standard clinical
terminologies in electronic health records (EHRs). Before
there was an Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for
Health Information Technology within HHS, she negotiated the
world's first nationwide license for a clinical terminology,
SNOMED CT, with usage terms favorable to the US. This became
a model for other countries and was adopted by the
International Health Terminology Standards Development
Organisation (IHTSDO) when it was formed to put ownership of
SNOMED CT in an international entity. She was IHTSDO's
founding Chair and has served with distinction as its US
member.
With the establishment of the ONC, she led NLM's
substantial and ongoing collaboration with that body to
develop, support, and disseminate for free US use the key
clinical terminologies required for certification of EHR
products and use of EHRs by Medicare and Medicaid providers
and hospitals. She also directed the development and
dissemination of many tools, including mappings, subsets,
browsers, etc., and innovative systems, including the NLM
Value Set Authority Center and NIH Common Data Element
Repository, to support the use of standards in health care,
quality measurement, and in research.
She directed the legislatively mandated expansion of
ClinicalTrials.gov to encompass registration of additional
trials and submission of summary results information. This
multi-year, multi-faceted process involved numerous partners
and stakeholders, showcasing her ability to grasp and solve
complex problems and her considerable skill at consensus
building. ClinicalTrials.gov is the largest and most heavily
used international clinical trials registry.
She worked tirelessly and creatively to expand and enhance
access to research publications, data, and high quality
health information for scientists, health professionals,
system and product developers, information professionals, and
the general public. This often involved building and
maintaining strong partnerships across the Federal government
to adapt and rebrand strategies to changes in Administrations
and priorities and to capitalize on emerging opportunities.
She oversaw the expansion of PubMed Central to include
direct deposits of articles from many publishers, manuscript
submissions from investigators of publications resulting from
NIH-funded research and research funded by other Federal
agencies and private funders, including the Gates Foundation,
and digitized articles from back issues of biomedical
journals, through a partnership with the Wellcome Trust.
She led a collaboration with the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) to make drug information and device
registrations submitted to the FDA by product manufacturers
available to the public via NLM's heavily used DailyMed
system. In addition, she guided the creation of the
AccessGUDID database, which provides public access to
registration data for medical devices.
Under her enthusiastic direction, NLM became an early
implementer of application programming interfaces and
download sites for its many heavily used data and information
resources, flinging open the gates and allowing their use by
other computer systems and by innovative product developers.
As NLM Acting Director, even in the face of hiring
restrictions, she enhanced the quality and efficiency of
NLM's high-volume operations, ensured reliable 24/7
availability of electronic information services that are
essential to research, health care, and public health
worldwide, and advanced major initiatives, including the re-
competition of NLM's Informatics Research Training Grants and
the re-competition and migration from contracts to
cooperative agreement grants of the Regional Medical
Libraries in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.
Throughout her career, in an exemplary fashion, she
demonstrated creativity, adaptability, and resilience in
partnering with stakeholders inside and outside of NLM. She
leads by fostering employee development, diversity, teamwork,
and making optimal use of human, financial, and information
resources.
Throughout NLM, she is respected and indeed beloved for her
kindness, her resourcefulness, and her can-do spirit. Truly a
treasure as a human being and as a public servant, she
demonstrated a career-long commitment to interagency
collaboration and harnessing government resources for the
public good.
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