Spring 2021 Newsletter |

Spring 2021 Newsletter

Welcome Spring!

It's time to get out and enjoy Southern California's trails and wildflowers and get recharged with a renewed focus on Healthcare IT events and networking with your peers. In this issue of our newsletter, you will find dates for upcoming events, educational tools, advocacy opportunities, and news about SoCal chapter members and sponsors. We hope you enjoy it.

Register Now - Annual Healthcare IT Virtual Conference - May 14, 2021

Agenda and speaker details coming soon! Register here.

#EFH - Education from Home To-Do List

Sponsor Corner

Hyperconverged Infrastructure: How to Pick the Right Technology to Transform Healthcare

With Lynne A. Dunbrack, Research Vice President, IDC Health Insights

Healthcare executives are managing a rapidly changing healthcare environment that is pushing healthcare organizations to transform their infrastructure to be future ready faster. Evolving business models and regulatory requirements are forcing IT to be more agile and more responsive to healthcare end users, requiring the rollout of new IT services while optimizing and rationalizing IT operations under tight budget constraints. Hyperconverged technologies are advancing the simplification of IT even further by integrating storage and storage management with compute and networking into a single software solution or appliance, thus enabling the adoption of cloud-based computing. Today's healthcare organizations are looking to reduce the number of platform vendors they use to simplify their IT infrastructure so that they reallocate technical support and maintenance spending to invest in more innovative IT initiatives that will meet the business and clinical demands of healthcare transformation.

The following questions were posed by Nutanix to Lynne A. Dunbrack, research vice president for IDC Health Insights, on behalf of Nutanix's customers.

Take Action to Support a National Patient Identification Strategy

As a founding member of the Patient ID Now Coalition, HIMSS invited the healthcare community to participate in Patient ID Day on March 24 by voicing support for a national patient identification strategy. This effort is ongoing and you can find out more and still participate by visiting this page.

CA HIT Advocacy Day in May

Members of the boards of the HIMSS Southern California and HIMSS Northern California Chapters of meet together as one Advocacy Committee each year in May to hold a Healthcare IT Advocacy Day. On this day, HIMSS board members discuss State and National legislative updates and contact state representatives in order to ensure local issues are aligned and prioritized with the action plans held by our state and national representatives. Stay tuned for the date of this year's CA HIT Day and virtual march webinars.

Member Corner

We asked and you answered! We're delighted to share your news and accomplishments in this section. At any time you have news to share about your HIT career, please send us an email and we will feature you in the next newsletter!

Leah Beck

Leah R Beck, MSHI, RHIA, Director, Health Information Management, Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, completed a graduate program last year and has been promoted to HIM Director since then with her MS in Health Informatics and RHIA credentials. "Due to COVID-19, I did not get to celebrate and share this accomplishment with my loved ones. It would have been awesome to honor and thank them for their support and understanding. I missed family gatherings, get togethers and everything else in between during the program as I focused on my studies," said Leah.

Jared Nunes

Jared M. Nunes, Executive Director, Informatics and Analytics, MHS Healthcare Intelligence at MemorialCare, was nominated by Narrative Science and featured as a 2021 Data Changemaker to Know. See Jared and the full list of winners here: https://rebrand.ly/datachangemaker

Brian Malec

Brian T. Malec, PhD, LFHIMSS, was awarded in 2020 both HIMSS "Life" membership and "Fellow" status. The 2020 award ceremony in 2020, will be held at the Advancement Reception August 10, 2021 during the HIMSS21 Global Conference in Las Vegas.

David Rauschendorfer

David Rauschendorfer, IT Security, DJO, published a book, Complete Guide to Building an Information Security Program, on Amazon and writes articles on his IT Security Blog.

Mary Ann Schultz

Dr. Mary Anne Schultz serves as a gubernatorial appointee of Gavin Newsom’s (CA) Advisory Council to the California Institute to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM), the first and only Registered Nurse advisor. https://opr.ca.gov/ciapm/about/advisory-council.html.

Dr. Schultz served as lead author for the following publication: Schultz, M. A., Walden, R. L., Cato, K., Coviak, C., Cruz, C., D’Agostino, F., Douthit, B. J., Forbes, T., Gao, G., Lee, M., Lekan, D., Weiban, A. & Jeffery, A. D. (in press). Data Science methods for Nursing-relevant patient outcomes and clinical processes: The 2019 literature year-in-review. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing. (In press)

The Precision Phenomenon

By Mary Anne Schultz PhD MBA MSN RN, Professor & Informaticist, CSUSB

Despite a number of years of dialogue and scholarly or governmental writings about highly individualized care, the Precision Phenomenon in healthcare is still poorly understood. Precision Medicine (PM), an emerging phenomenon is U. S. health care, is defined by the National Institute of Health (NIH) as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person” (https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/precisionmedicine/definition). This approach allows physicians and Nurse Practitioners to more effectively guage precisely which treatment, prevention and pharmaceutical orders are effective and for which groups or subgroups of people. To that end, very large data bases, known as “Big Data” are necessary so that researchers and those working in public policy can estimate the impact of lifestyle, biology and environment on health outcomes, factors that are largely under-reported, in fact, under-studied, in traditional biomedical research. A related concept, Precision Health (PH), is understood to be: a population-based approach that incorporates Big Data strategies to understand the complex interactions between biological, environmental, lifestyle and psychosocial factors that affect health (Menon, Cohn, Downs, Gephart & Redwine, 2019). The common core between the two phenomena, then, is: the reliance on individual level data to recommend a course of action which is in sharp contrast to medical decision-making largely derived from a cohort or sample of observations regularly used in traditional research. This article elaborates some commonalities in these Precision Phenomena and a glance at the status of them in national, regional and statewide environments.

By Barrington (Barry) Hunt, MPA, Faculty, College of Business and Economics, California State University, Los Angeles

During a long career as a LA County DHS/DPH healthcare administrator and a lecturer at California State University, many have asked the three questions below about how to recognize and become a leader. Here are my answers, perspectives and guidance.

What is leadership? To me leadership means: having a clear vision to seize opportunities, making excellent decisions under pressure, finding the courage to do the right thing consistently and motivating others in one’s 360-degree sphere to do likewise. Accomplishing this requires implementing the highest values, developing a strategic plan and setting achievable goals. The best statement of this I’ve seen is here:

L A County Values, Strategic Plan and Goals: http://lacounty.gov/strategic-plan-and-goals/

CMIO Pandemic Panel - May 2021 TBA

Stay tuned for details on this exciting virtual event from our CMIO Committee!