10 Healthcare IT Leaders You Should Know: Recap of HIMSS23

As the Event Coordinator at Healthump, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can use event marketing to not only grow Healthjump’s presence but also how the Humans of Healthjump use conferences to connect with the industry at large. As a first-time HIMSS attendee, I found that the greatest value of attending HIMSS was connecting with people, in formal and informal ways. 

Being in conversation with others in the industry for information sharing, troubleshooting, you name it, has a value that cannot be underemphasized. Especially as the conversation grows around health equity and supporting the most marginalized.

If the industry shares a vision for how we can improve healthcare for clinicians and patients, why would you wait for a couple of key events throughout the year to connect?

In my last blog, 3 Ways to Optimize your Experience at HIMSS, I mentioned our Leaders in Leveraging Health Data Series as a way to increase the value you get from the conference. Carrying the momentum from HIMSS through to the other 51 weeks of the year is an important way to get the best return on your investment in time, money, and energy. 

Even if you were not able to attend, the conversations from HIMSS, and any other event, continue online. 

Healthjump is proud to preview the list of thought leaders we interviewed at HIMSS23. Connect and engage with this group if you’re looking for a place to start!

1. Jay Anders, MD. is the Chief Medical Officer at Medicomp, where he spearheads Medicomp’s knowledge base team and clinical advisory board, working closely with doctors and nurses to ensure that all Medicomp products are developed based on user needs and preferences to enhance usability.
   “One of my missions in this industry is to make things easier to use and actually give something back to the clinicians who are trying to use these systems. So my job is get them into a situation where they actually can use systems and it will be fruitful for them and the patients.”
2. ‍Susanne Blazek is the Director of the Behavioral Reinforcement Learning Lab at Lirio, where she conducts behavioral research that Lirio combines with AI to power hyper-personalized health consumer experiences.
   “With Lirio, I’ve found a purpose-driven organization that allows me to use my strengths to establish substantiated claims about our intervention outcomes, to validate and improve our interventions, and to contribute back to the field of behavioral science, specifically health psychology… We use health data so that we can KNOW people. We move people to better health.”
3. ‍Liz Buckle is the Director of Product at CommonWell Health Alliance, where she is responsible for overseeing the execution of the Alliance vision that health data should be available to individuals and caregivers regardless of where care occurs both with the expansion of new use cases and enhancing existing ones.
   “[CommonWell Alliance is] a vendor neutral organization that focuses on collaboration. Bringing people together to solve hard problems. And so just the ability to facilitate those conversations in a meaningful way is one of the most impactful ways to participate within the health IT community and really drive it forward and make change.”
4. ‍Susan Clark is the Principal Health IT Consultant at Briljent, where she is on a quest to connect diverse data sources to create efficiencies and improve lives by promoting health information sharing in policy and practice. 
   “I personally am very involved in policy for my clients. I am monitoring all the rules that come out, or state Medicaid director letters, those types of things. Whenever something comes out, I'm the person that's gonna look at it and tell you ‘This is gonna impact you and you need to pay attention,’ or, or ‘You should really comment because this is gonna change how you work.”
5. ‍Gabriel Garcia-Lopez is the Director of Health Information Systems at the LA LGBT Center, where he is responsible for leading data integrity, standards, and stewardship committee to support the agency's quality management program.
   “I love coming to these conferences to really help educate vendors on how they can design their systems that are more human-centered, that take into account and truly address health from an LGBTQ+ perspective. So that's everything from collecting SOGI data, sexual orientation and gender identity data, then also looking at different ways that we can better understand our patients so they feel seen and that they're engaging in the healthcare system the best way that they can.”
6. ‍Ian McClendon is the Principal at Intuitus Solutions LLC, where he leads healthcare IT consulting with public and private companies, as well as the federal government; Ian personally works on how cancer registries and data can improve cancer surveillance. 
   “These are legacy [systems] that have been in place a long, long time, and it's gonna take a lot of time and effort to change these and modernize these, but it's gradually happening. I think public health in the next, 5-10 years is really going to change tremendously, especially with AI, and with all the money that the government's putting into modernizing technology. We're sort of right at the precipice of that happening.”
7. ‍David Ramoley is the Chief Client Officer at Soap Health, where he advances their mission to save the lives of millions of people by improving early disease detection and diagnosis.
   “What we're doing at Soap Health is really looking at being the most comprehensive digital intake in terms of clinical data direct from the patient. So by engaging the patient prior to the visit, this is an untapped space that we can capture detailed medical history and information directly from the patient. We're able to provide this data to the physician, the nurses, the MAs, and so on, prior to their visit, and then be able to essentially empower them with that [data].”
8. ‍Garrett Schmitt is the CEO & Co-Founder of VBC Exhibit Hall, where he leads vendor relations as well as procuring, editing and promoting the educational material on the site for a value-based care audience.
   “I think it's very important to not silo yourself in this. Everyone has to work together. If value-based care is gonna work, then we all have to be connected. And so I think going to these conferences is a great way to do that.”
9. ‍Nhan Tran is a Data Scientist at Memorial Hermann Health System, where he creates prediction models and dashboards informed by the end user’s data needs and use case to present meaningful data to the team at Memorial Hermann.
   “Just a couple of years ago we started moving our data onto the cloud and it had an immediate impact on my workflow…Nowadays, accessing the healthcare data is much more secure, faster, and allows us to develop really advanced tools that we couldn't before, especially with modeling and predictions.”
10. ‍Kathryn Ayers Wickenhauser is the Senior Director of Community Strategy at Direct Trust, where she is responsible for leading communication, membership, and advocacy efforts in support of a secure, interoperable health information exchange.
    “We saw a need to bolster community and an opportunity for that. So as a Senior Director of Community Strategy, part of my role is to help figure out what we need to do, where we need to be, how to work with our membership, how to really figure out how we move the needle on interoperability and what we can contribute to this space. I think it's also critically important that we're a positive voice for interoperability.”
    

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