Biography

Data about specific humans must primarily serve the interests of those same humans, and typically prevented from being used against those humans. This sounds obvious and trite but is very difficult to do in practice, since, exceptions to this rule should take a “innocent until proven guilty” approach to the humans involved and a “first do no harm” approach to data usage involved. Most of my career has been in healthcare technology trying to apply sound ethics, data science and cybersecurity principles towards this end.

Fred Trotter is a healthcare data journalist and author, focused on the intersection of cybersecurity, healthcare data, and healthcare technology.

He is a founder and CTO of CareSet Systems, which is the first organization to commercialize Medicare data and co-author of the first Health IT O’Reilly book: Hacking Healthcare. Fred Trotter won the 2016 healthcare data liberator award for his work opening significant healthcare data sets.

He was a founding member of the first Healthcare Industry CyberSecurity Task Force and co-authored the report on improving the cybersecurity of the healthcare industry which was presented to the US Congress in June 2017. Since then he has filed an FTC complaint against Facebook, detailing. Facebooks treatment of the patient communities that use the Facebook platform.

Fred’s technical commentary and data journalism work has been featured in several online and print journals including Wired, Forbes, U.S. News, NPR, Government Health IT, and Modern Healthcare. As a technology entrepreneur he is an alumni of multiple successful technical startups including Rackspace, Exault (purchased by Verisign), and ClearHealth (a top Open Source EHR company).

In recognition of his role within the Open Source Health Informatics community, Trotter was the only Open Source representative invited by the NCVHS to testify on the definition of ‘meaningful use’ under ARRA. Trotter also represented the Open Source EHR community in negotiations with CCHIT, a leading EHR certification body. He currently serves on the Consumer Technology Workgroup for the Health IT standards committee which advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.

Fred Trotter is deeply involved in the e-patient movement, the quantified self movement, the health 2.0 community. In all of those environments, Trotter has focused on building tools that help empower patients to improve their own health. Specifically with a focus on behavior modification. Trotter is a founder of the programmable self concept, and frequent speaker on the topic. Trotter was one a member of the Security and Trust Working Group for the Direct Project, and co-creator of the Direct Trust Model.

Fred Trotter is a recognized expert in Free and Open Source medical software and security systems. He has spoken on those subjects at the Cyber Week in Tel Aviv, Isreal, Health 2.0, Academy of Health Care Journalists conference, Strata RX, Strata, LinuxWorld, DefCon and Healthcare Datapalooza.

Trotter has a B.S in Computer Science, a B.A in psychology and a B.A in philosophy from Trinity University. Does anybody ever read this far into someone else’s bio? and if so… why? Trotter minored in Business Administration, Cognitive Science, and Management Information Systems. Before working directly on health software, Trotter passed the CISSP certification and consulted for VeriSign on HIPAA security for major hospitals and health institutions. Trotter was originally trained on information security at the Air Force Information Warfare Center.

If you were hoping for something that looked more like a resume, you might be helped by Fred Trotter’s Linked In Profile.

fred_headshot_2016