About the Founders

Alan Lieberman and Hugh Brownstone have a combined 40+ years in the health care information, computer, financial services, and consulting industries.   They met while executives at IMS HEALTH, formerly a division of Dun & Bradstreet and publisher of some of the largest commercial health information databases in the world. Over the past ten years, they've become good friends.

Hugh began his corporate career at American Management Systems (AMS), a computer systems consulting firm.   Located in the heart of Wall Street, Hugh's clientele consisted of large money center banks.   He subsequently joined Barclays Bank in the mid-1980's where he held a variety of senior management positions in technology, operations, re-engineering, and strategy.   He joined IMS six years later where at various points he ran their R&D group; software services; new business development for Europe; and created and executed their global Internet strategy.  

Alan's health care information career began more than 20 years ago.   Initially his focus was the creation and maintenance of very large databases containing health care transactions.   In the early 1990's, Alan spent several years working closely with several pharmaceutical manufacturers to ensure that the manufacturers were using their information appropriately.  

Their encounter at IMS Health and subsequent partnership have led Alan and Hugh to spend nearly 10 years exploring how to help the American public use quantitative, objective data to better navigate the health care system.    This web site is the culmination of that effort, and the beginning of truly empowering consumers to get the quality health care they - we all - deserve.

•About Our Funding

We made a New Year's resolution today (January 1, 2006). Up until now, Who Says has not accepted any advertising, nor any form of grant or other support from any of the entities it reviews or about which it writes. Up until now, all funding for Who Says has come directly from Hugh and Alan.

But with the New Year, we're modifying our stance in order to recover some of the expenses in running our site: we'll allow Amazon to advertise books based on automated criteria. Similarly, we've added Google ads. We have no control over the content of these ads and our pragmatic decision to include these ads doesn't change our editorial policy one iota. We are insulated from any pressure we might otherwise feel from advertisers - because we have no say in the ad content.

If and when Amazon gets into medical informatics, we'll revisit our decision.

We had the opportunity to speak with Linda Coburn and she mentioned Who Says Your Doctor's OK? in the November 26, 2007 issue of The San Fernando Valley Business Journal.