Winter 2017 Newsletter

Message from the President

Happy Holidays NorCal HIMSS Members!

This is always a very busy time of the year for most people, and for our NorCal HIMSS Chapter, that is no exception. We are just coming off of our Annual CxO Summit, our first educational program of the year, at which our event committee co-chaired by Nick Steinbach and Santosh Mohan brought about an incredible speaker lineup designed to facilitate productive dialogue and accelerate collaboration between CIOs, CMIOs, IT leaders and their non-IT executive colleagues. This was our third event for the fiscal year, and we are happy to report that it was a sold out success just like the first two!  

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How Do You Innovate What You Can’t See? Searching for the Unknown

By Jim Bloedau, BS-MT, RRT, CPHIMS, President Elect, Innovation Chair, Northern California HIMSS

Innovation is a well-worn term these days. If you Google “what is innovation,” 107 million listings appear, which contain thousands of definitions. We use words like change, revolution, transformation, breakthrough and modernization to describe what we used to call “new,” or today, what we call “innovative.”

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Are You A Savvy Marketer? Great Opportunity To Position Yourself in the Northern California Healthcare Community

Our chapter is actively seeking savvy-experienced marketers to help form our Chapter Marketing Group that will elevate and leverage the Northern California Chapter of HIMSS brand within our region. Our challenge is to find a number of amazingly talented, passionate and gracious people who can help form and lead marketing teams that:

  • Develop our overall messaging that promotes the mission of our chapter and events by reaching out to our unique audience in a separate and distinctive manner from traditional news media
  • Regularly produce new content on healthcare and health IT issues through original works of the membership, curation of previous “must read” resources or cultivating topical online discussions...

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Introduction to MACRA

By Larry Ozeran, President, Clinical Informatics, Inc.

Now that the elections are behind us, most of us in healthcare are focused on MACRA (Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015). MACRA was how Congress replaced the SGR (Sustainable Growth Rate) after years of unsuccessful legislative alternatives. In the last 20 years, only the 2010 ACA (Affordable Care Act) is likely to have a bigger impact on our healthcare system than MACRA. (If the ACA is repealed . . well, that is a story for another day.)

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National HIT Week - Advocacy Committee

By Ian Slade, HIMSS CAR Vice Chair Western Region
and Shanti Wilson, HIMSS Northern California Chair of HIT Advocacy

The week of September 26, 2016 was National Health IT Week. This year’s theme celebrated precision medicine, telemedicine, women in IT and interoperability. The Northern and Southern California HIMSS Chapters presented the “Commitment to Health IT” award to the University of California, Davis Health System for their ongoing excellence in using IT to improve the health of Californians. We had the pleasure to hear from prior Davies and EMRAM Stage 7 winners Dr. Jeffrey Wadja, CMIO, John Cook, Interim CIO and Dr. Scott McDonald, EHR Medical Director. Over fifty attendees participated, and we were able to have a personal tour of their state of the art hospital. Congratulations to our UC Davis partner!

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2017 ePatient Summit

By Margit Chapman

The Northern California HIMSS Chapter continues its annual patient-centered HIT learning and networking event. The ePatient Summit planning committee is excited to be orchestrating an amazing conference for 2017, in collaboration with El Camino Hospital and The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, to focus on the latest digital innovations, big impact trends and most prominent challenges shaping patient experience and care in Northern California and beyond. We will have a full spectrum of industry leaders, experts and patients weighing in on consumer driven approaches in healthcare and offering tactical insights on how technology can help build loyalty by winning over patients. The full-day event is being strategically organized into two tracks to address the positioning of patients both as “consumers” and as “partners”. 

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Why St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, The Mayo Clinic, and Leading Pharma and Medical Device Companies Have Digital Advisory Boards

By Sherri Douville, CEO, Medigram, @SherriDouville

Digital Transformation Is Hard For All Companies

In our work leading a digital health IT company, we are intrigued by the stated digital ambitions of leading health systems. We look at the actual path to execution for digital transformation. We are fascinated by this challenge, which affects all companies, including technology companies. Difficulty driving digital transformation is not unique to healthcare. For digital leaders, the ability to drive transformation shows how much leadership is actually required of their teams, together with their innovation partners to overcome the biases that digitally challenged firms will impose to defend against the changes of digital transformation.

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