Fred Trotter

About Fred Trotter

Fred Trotter is a Healthcare Data Journalist and author, who is well regarded as an expert in Clinical Data Analysis, Healthcare Informatics, Differential Privacy and Clinical Cybersecurity. He is co-author of the first Health IT O’Reilly book \"Hacking Healthcare\". For his work on healthcare data transparency he was awarded the 2016 Health Data Liberator award from Health Datapalooza and Academy Health.Trotter designed CareSet’s data analysis approach as it provides advanced analytical services to more than half the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the United States. This includes designing enterprise performance measures and data management operations. CareSet services have Included research on the medication usage, patient journey mapping and vaccine penetration analysis for both Flu and COVID-19.As a data journalist, Trotter has conducted comparative performance measures on the Meaningful Use of EHR systems, including the construction of a dataset centered on e-prescribing called PaPR. The DocGraph dataset, Trotter’s original analysis of how physicians cooperate has been repeatedly cited in clinical research as well as in the mainstream press.Trotter’s most recent work includes an analysis conducted with the Wall Street Journal in “Covid Spurs Families to Shun Nursing Homes, a Shift That Appears Long Lasting”. Other journalists who have leveraged Trotter’s advanced analytical services include Propublica and US News.Trotter served on the ad-hoc Whitehouse COVID hospital data agile data workgroup, which produced the HHS-cited FAQ for two different COVID-19 datasets.Trotter has consulted on data analytics approaches for multiple large and complex national and international organizations, including Merck, Mayo Clinic, and the UK’s NHS.Fred was chief architect of Houston, TX first health information exchange. Fred was a founder of the Direct Project and one of the designers of the Direct Protocol. The Direct Protocol is a secure email standard for doctor-doctor and doctor-patient communications that is now mandated for EHR systems in the United States.Fred served as the patient representative on the first Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force, which released its Report on Improving Cybersecurity in the Health Care Industry to Congress in June of 2017. In this role, Trotter was relied upon to assess threats to patient privacy as the result of data aggregation threats like mosaic attacks. This included the effectiveness of Differential Privacy approaches for protecting patients from unwarranted risk.

Experience

1. Technologist

   Digital Service At Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services Cms

   May 2025 — Present · Washington, DC, US

   I work on data systems with the CMS Digital Services Team.

Education

• Trinity University

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Psychology

  1994 — 1999

• Trinity University

  Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science

  1994 — 1999

• Trinity University

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Philosophy

  1994 — 1999

Skills

• Big Data
• Information Technology
• Ehealth
• Hl7
• Integration
• Meaningful Use
• Open Source Software
• Interoperability
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Information Exchange
• Security
• Enterprise Software
• Enterprise Architecture
• Healthcare Information Technology (Hit)
• Informatics
• Healthcare
• Hipaa
• Data Science
• Requirements Analysis
• Firewalls
• U.s. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa)
• Computer Security
• Ehr
• Artificial Neural Networks
• Network Security
• Linux
• Software Development
• Software Project Management
• Data Journalism
• Healthcare Information Technology
• Electronic Medical Record (Emr)
• Open Source
• Artificial Intelligence
• Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (Hedis)
• Information Security