Elliot M. Stone, Headed State Health Data Consortium

STOUGHTON – Elliot M. Stone, 59, of Stoughton, executive director and CEO of Massachusetts Health Data Consortium since it was established in 1978 as a private non-profit corporation, died Tuesday at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after a very short battle with cancer.

The consortium is a neutral setting for collection and analysis of large health care databases.

Mr. Stone received the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange Award of Merit during the WEDI Fall Conference in Atlanta, on Nov. 16. In 1995, he organized the Affiliated Health Information Networks of New England project to improve the state’s electronic health care information infrastructure among health plans and providers through standards required by the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

He had been an advisor to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Center for Health Statistics, AcademyHealth, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John A. Hartford Foundation, the Markle Foundation and The Commonwealth Fund.

The Massachusetts Public Health Association honored him with its Alfred M. Frechette award for outstanding contributions to the field of public health.

In 2004, he took the consortium in a new direction and raised $1.2 million from area health plans and grants to fund a new venture – Mass SHARE. Its first project, assessing patient prescriptions from hospital emergency departments, represented his goal of encouraging health care entities to work together by applying cooperation and technology to make medical care safer for patients.

Prior to 1974, he worked as a systems analyst for John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. and then as an instructor for Honewell Institute for Information Sciences. In 1976, the Commissioner of Public Health appointed him director of the Division of Health Statistics.

He served on the Stoughton Board of Health nine years.

Mr. Stone was born in Providence, R.I. and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston University, and completed an executive program in health care management at Yale University.

He is survived by his wife, Janie (Cohen) Stone; two sons, Robert Stone and Jeffrey Stone, both of Chicago, Ill., and a sister, Freda Lehrer of Cranston, R.I.

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at Ahavath Torah Congregation, 1179 Central St., Stoughton. Burial will be in Sharon Memorial Park, Sharon.

Arrangements are by Brezniak-Rodman Levine-Briss, Randolph.