Booz Allen
Executive Leadership

Susan L. Penfield

Senior Vice President

A Senior Vice President based at Booz Allen Hamilton’s Rockville, Maryland office, Susan Penfield specializes in the management and strategic use of information technology within the national health industry.

Ms. Penfield has almost two dozen years of strategy development and technology delivery experience for a wide scope of clients and engagements, her focus includes:

• Devising strategies for health data interoperability
• Developing analytics tools to unlock the power of strategic health information to support comparative effectiveness research and healthcare quality and safety
• Increasing the integration of public health information to support food safety, chronic disease management, and collaborative research
• Developing IT modernization strategies for regulatory, safety, payment, and public health mission systems
• Implementing effective informatics programs to support data sharing and analysis

Ms. Penfield has provided consulting services for every major federal health-related organization in the U.S., including the Veterans Administration, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and National Institutes for Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Ms. Penfield is a leader in health reform initiatives within both the federal and not-for-profit communities. She has been engaged in many of the leading issues facing the healthcare industry.

• Overseeing the development of and providing program management and strategy and technology support for the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG), including developing the architecture to support collection, sharing, and analysis of data for a broad community of cancer researchers across institutions, registries, pharmaceutical and biotech industries, and sub-disciplines of clinical and research informatics.
• Developing a National Plan To Combat Alzheimer’s Disease through support of the Alzheimer’s Study Group (ASG).  Booz Allen assisted the Alzheimer’s Study Group in developing a National Alzheimer’s Strategic Plan by deploying its powerful strategic planning methodology and comprehensive understanding of the healthcare sector in developing the Alzheimer’s Solutions Project framework and recommendations for solving the current crisis.
• Implementing large-scale technology transformation programs to serve mission needs and a system to support FDA’s pharmacovigilance programs, data collection, and associated technologies that support the NIH’s National Children’s Study.
• Designing, developing, and conducting avian flu strategic simulations, which led to reports now widely referenced by the public and media.  Co-authored the strategy business magazine article “Avian Flu: A Test of Collective Integrity.”
• Transforming the CDC’s Vaccine for Children program by streamlining vaccine distribution by creating efficient inventory management procedures and simplifying provider ordering and approval processes.
• Evaluating issues facing our healthcare system like medical identity theft, healthcare safety, and quality and comparative effectiveness research.

A recognized thought leader, Ms. Penfield has co-authored several industry articles, her most recent—"Toward Health Information Liquidity: Realization of Better, More Efficient Care From the Free Flow of Health Information"—is focused on how health information and communications technology (health IT) can accelerate progress towards health reform and a genuinely patient-centered health care system.

Her career experience spans a variety of technology management positions and support for science, engineering, and financial organizations.

Ms. Penfield serves on the Center for Health Transformation and the National Women’s Health Resource Center Board of Directors, she is a trustee for the NIH Children’s Inn Board of Directors, and is a member of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society. She holds a B.S. degree in technology management from Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and a certificate in Management from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business.

profile updated June 2010