Underlying Standards That Support Population Health Improvement

This book highlights success stories and challenges to implementing health IT standards. The narrative of each chapter demonstrates how standards further interoperable health data exchange, especially in the service of advancing tools to monitor population health. These are critical stories that demonstrate to an international community of health and IT experts how to bring the right stakeholders together and bridge classic divides between software architects and clinical end users, health system decision-makers and standard authors.

Laura Bright is a Health Informatics and Standards Specialist based in Toronto. Laura Bright is a past co-chair of the Patient Care Coordination Technical Committee and has also been a member and the secretariat of the IHE Canada Steering committee, and Board Member and Director at Large of IHE Canada. She is a strong advocate of ensuring a broad and international perspective to standards authorship. Ms. Bright has also recently been active in developing standards for privacy and security, clinical documents, and care delivery. Ms. Bright’s 15 year career in healthcare covers a wide variety of disciplines, including experience in planning, developing and implementing innovative health IT solutions in a variety of environments. She can communicate complex ideas at a variety of levels and building consensus among diverse stakeholder groups, with a unique blend of business and technical skill sets resulting from a diverse professional background, a solid educational foundation, and several industry-recognized certifications. Notable projects include the development of treatment planning software for stereotactic radiation therapy, an innovative project to produce software for both imageguided and imageless hip and knee replacement surgery, and development of an eMPI, non-operational data repositories, EHR viewer, and a Patient Portals. During this period Laura also obtained her Project Management Professional credentials, and CPHIMS/CPHIMS-CA certifications. In recent years, she has contributed her expertise and experience as a Senior Architect, Product Manager, and Standards Specialist both in the private and public sectors.

Johanna Goderre is the Senior Health Informatics Advisor to the Office of Population Affairs in the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. Johanna Goderre is a public health professional with over 10 years’ experience conducting public health studies, from concept development and grant application to implementation, quality assurance, analysis, and publication in an academic research setting. Her professional experience and interests bridge technical domains like information technology and statistical analysis with health domains that deliver high-quality, evidenced based care to large populations - thus ensuring these often separate worlds can come together to use their own data to advance health improvements. Ms. Goderre currently manages Family Planning standards in development and testing in two IHE committees: Information Technology Infrastructure and Quality, Research, and Public Health. These standards will support transitioning an aggregate service delivery reporting system to a 21st century encounter-level system that can return clinically-relevant performance measures in a user-friendly and visually actionable manner. This new system will accept standards-based summaries of health encounters from EHR systems in over 4000 clinical settings in all US states and territories. She has been able to take a relatively little-known clinical field with little affiliation to health IT standards through initial authorship of data exchange and clinical decision support standards to pilot testing, all with the clinical end-users engaged in the technical and privacy and security guidance, in 15 months.