WOMEN IN HEALTH IT

HIMSS has launched an awards program to put the spotlight exclusively on influential women in health IT and their achievements. The awards recognize women both for their individual achievements on the job and also for their influence on other women in the health IT field. HIMSS initiated the program and the awards ceremony to come in response to a survey that revealed women were not recognized for their work and contributions. The survey elicited comments, such as: “We see very little about women in this field.” “Rare to hear success stories.” “Comments from experts tend to be from males only.” “Most recognition that I’ve seen has always gone to male management or clinical personnel.” “While I have extensive knowledge, I feel invisible.” “I don’t even know who the women leaders are in our industry.” The award nominations will open in the summer/fall of 2016. Award winners will be announced in the winter of 2017. A private VIP Awards Dinner will be held at HIMSS17, as well as a Women in Health IT reception to celebrate the winners. More at: http://www.himss.org/News/NewsDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=47294  

National Coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, is stepping away from the co-chair role on the ONC Health IT Policy Committee. Kathleen Blake, MD, vice president of performance improvement at the American Medical Association, will replace DeSalvo, according to Politico, which reported the announcement was made Tuesday at the joint meeting of the Health IT Policy and Standards Committees. Blake will serve alongside DeSalvo's current co-chair, Paul Tang, MD, chief innovation and technology officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Tang is also the head of ONC's meaningful use workgroup.  [Also: How satisfied are you with your EHR? Satisfaction Survey results]  DeSalvo currently serves as both National Coordinator for Health IT and Acting Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. She's been with ONC since January 2014. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell brought DeSalvo to HHS in October 2014 to help coordinate the federal government respond to the Ebola outbreak – touting her public health qualifications after having served as New Orleans Health Commissioner in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In May 2015, President Barack Obama appointed DeSalvo HHS Acting Assistant Secretary for Health. If she gets a Senate confirmation hearing and is approved, she would step down from the National Coordinator post at ONC.   Twitter: SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com Like Healthcare IT News on Facebook and LinkedIn

Security chief Meredith Phillips says the health system reorganized internally to more effectively manage and secure 60,000 medical and Internet of Things devices, and to strongly position itself to handle evolving threats, such as ransomware.

The research also found that womens’ salaries grew at a higher rate than their male counterparts, while orthopedists, cardiologists, dermatologists are the highest-paid doctors.  

Judy Faulkner readily admits that when she founded Epic Systems she had no idea how to start a company.  Faulkner discussed those early years as well as some of today’s most contentious topics including semantic data interoperability, why the U.S. needs a unique patient ID, and the impact that electronic health records software has on physician productivity. Semantic standards are key for data exchange. If you're going to do interoperability between organizations, which I think is critical, it's limited because you have to define and normalize and harmonize the data so that each group can understand the other. Let's examine gender. I may have one for male, two for female, and then two other kinds of genders, ambiguous and something else. [Also: Judy Faulkner: 'Good software is art.'] On the other hand, they may have one for female and a range of other values. How do you move that over when different groups have different ways of doing that? You need standards. There's a limited number of standards that we have to be able to transmit the data. I use such a simple example as gender, but as you go into the drug and other databases, there is even greater complexity. Within your organization you want to share. It's critically important to also get information back and forth from other groups who aren't yours. Unique patient ID has to happen. I think each person should have a medical identity. I don't care whether it's federal or not. However, the lack of this is not an excuse. You can do a lot of patient matching based on other attribute checking and so the identity would make it easier, but it is not an absolutely critical thing. Remote care is the future. Healthcare going to stay local to a great extent. I think it's going to also move to telemedicine much more than it is right now because we have to reduce the resources that we're using and the expense that we have in healthcare. Also people don't want to travel if they can help it. It will be a little slower than people would like. Physician productivity among Epic's priorities. Make sure your doctors are productive users. Focus on your doctors being productive users and all your users being happy. Because if that happens, then the rest will just fall out. Doctors happy, No. 1. And doctors happy means that they're taking good care of their patients, by the way, because doctors will not be happy if they're not, and I think that's really important, so I don't want to separate that out. 'I had no idea how you start a company.’ After I built it, I went around to a lot of different departments in University of Wisconsin and worked with them. One department had money for six months for a programmer to do something. There were only 20 data elements, and I remember charging them for 45 minutes of time. You can see why customers all around the country told people, ‘Look what they are doing." They'd call me up and say, "Start a company," and I would laugh and say, "No." This went on for about two years. Finally I said ‘Yes.’ You have to realize I wore blue jeans. In the summer I wore T-shirts; in the winter I wore sweatshirts. I cut my hair with scissors, no makeup. I was a normal programmer and I had no idea how you start a company. So I went to somebody who had spun off from the university, and he said three things: One, get permission from the university, get a good lawyer, get a good accountant. I did all three. It was great advice. I started the company, valued it at $70,000, and I invited my customers to join in and be part of the original shareholders. There are a lot of people then who helped start Epic … We divided it up, so if you had 5 percent of the company, you paid $3,500, and that got us started. We started with one and a half people. I had a morning assistant and an afternoon assistant. We were in a basement of an apartment house. That was it. We signed a bunch of contracts and never took outside money from venture capital or went public or anything like that. Twitter: @HealthITNews

In a frank conversation with Healthcare IT News, the Epic CEO says her company gets a bad rap. But the numbers show it more than stacks up.

The forum brought together women in various management, technology and clinical roles to discuss how best to create community, resources and content to address the interests of women.

Patricia Mechael has been appointed executive vice president, Personal Connected Health Alliance at HIMSS, effective April 15, HIMSS President and CEO Steve Lieber announced on Thursday. Mechael will serve as consultant for HIMSS until her official appointment. She'll facilitate market analysis, business planning processes and guide immediate term goals. At PCHA, she hopes to advance trends toward self-care technology as a way to address challenges such as chronic illness management and mental health. [Also: The making of an mHealth maven] Mechael most recently served as executive director of the mHealth Alliance and as Principal and Policy Lead for HealthEnabled. She also has collaborated with the mHealth Summit for more than seven years. She has 15 years of experience in field building and thought leadership. At HealthEnabled, she concentrates on global thought leadership and advocacy, research and policy work in Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda, while working with the World Health Organization to create a Global Health Index and State of the World's Digital Health Report. She was recently awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center fellowship for a study entitled, the Future of Health is Digital that highlighted the use of technology to improve patient outcomes and strengthen the health system. Twitter: @JessiefDavis

Sue Schade, chief information officer at University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, plans to leave that role and will instead focus on consulting, coaching and interim management work after spending more than 30 years leading IT departments.

Men, on average, earned $126,262, compared to $100,762 for women in the survey of 1,900 healthcare professionals that includes CEOs, CIOs, IT project managers and other titles.