Welcome to another lovely newsletter of your chapter!

It has been just a few months since I put pen to paper to talk to you about happenings in the chapter, but, indeed your chapter has been very busy across all fronts.

After a fantastic CIO Forum (Thank you, CIOs), we have had our share of conferences, seminars and educational events apart from the National HIMSS16 Conference in February. Below is a recap:

• Our relationship with the local chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA) blossomed with us jointly collaborating on marketing their Informatics Education Seminar in LA
• Our Annual Healthcare IT Conference was as usual an event that was extremely well attended where we had our members collaborate on various topics such as population health, patient engagement and the next wave of EHRs. (Insert Picture)
• Our Academic Alliance Community held their Health IT Career Roundtable in San Diego under the auspices of National University attracting many budding Health IT career seeking individuals.
• The 8th Annual Clinical Informatics Summit featured a list of distinguished speakers who spoke to a sold out crowd of members across the healthcare spectrum on various topics including data segmentation and patient engagement.
• Our special Advocacy luncheon hosted members of staff and representatives of the State Legislature and attended by members of the Board and invited guests. 

The HIMSS16 Conference, as you may all know, was held in Las Vegas drew over 43K attendees. Considering the proximity to our Chapter, we had a phenomenal turnout at our reception by members both from Southern and Northern California! Many thanks to CSC and Infinite for their gracious sponsorship of the event.

Yours truly, who is also the Chair of the National Privacy and Security Committee, had quite a few other voluntary duties at the conference including meeting with Lucia Savage, Chief Privacy Officer, Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and other members.

Our members of the Southern California Chapter also play a vital role in shaping Health IT’s future by participating in conferences, seminars and committees. Your chapter is glad to recognize all of you who serve in these capacities if you can share these with us.

Our Chapter’s Marketing and Communications team has done a tremendous job with social media. Our stats surpassed many of our past highs and we are well on our way to establishing a record among the chapters for tweets! Thank you to all our members who made this happen.

It is that time of the year when the Board deliberates on the next year’s leadership and I am glad to report with so many voluntary leaders who excel in their spheres of expertise we will have another terrific Board for 2016-17.

A Request to our Organizational Affiliates (OA) – which includes most of us:

Our chapter has many Organizational Affiliate (OA) entities as members. Organizational Affiliates are healthcare organizations including health systems, ambulatory, private, Not for profit, etc., who have joined HIMSS at the corporate level. All OA employees can sign up for membership with our Chapter at no charge. It is a great benefit to take advantage of.

If we can ask each of the existing OA organizations to have their staff take the initiative and sign up for membership, we can continue to provide educational programs, networking opportunities and career advancement support to an expanded membership base. Please support us in these efforts.

As always, it has been a pleasure to serve you and the chapter.

Sriram Bharadwaj
President, HIMSS Southern California Chapter

Return to Spring 2016 Newsletter