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California Regional Health Information Organization Appoints Staff; Statewide Collaborative Will Establish Secure Electronic Health Information Exchange

Posted on: Friday, 20 May 2005, 12:01 CDT

Two project directors have been appointed by the California Regional Health Information Organization (CalRHIO), a new non-profit, collaborative, statewide initiative to enable physicians, hospitals, and patients to securely access vital health information electronically. RHIOs are a major component of President Bush's plan to implement a national health information network and electronic medical records for all Americans within 10 years.

Ann Donovan, RN, MSN, is overseeing the development and coordination of CalRHIO, which serves as an umbrella organization, bringing together the state's health plans, providers, hospitals, consumers, public agencies, and others to jointly create a secure, integrated, efficient system for exchanging patient information and expanding the use of information technology in health care.

Karen Hunt, MA, is managing CalRHIO initiatives, beginning with a project to electronically link hospital emergency rooms across the state so physicians can access critical patient information.

"Ann Donovan and Karen Hunt bring experienced leadership and a critical set of skills to guide the successful development of CalRHIO and to build understanding and buy-in for its mission and goals," said Molly J. Coye, chair of the CalRHIO Steering Committee and CEO of HealthTech, a San Francisco-based nonprofit health care technology research and education organization, which is managing CalRHIO.

Donovan, a practicing acute care nurse, has served in executive leadership roles in hospital and IT vendor organizations. Prior to joining CalRHIO, she was an independent consultant to Internet startups for health care applications. Her background includes serving as web producer for Medicalogic's online application for physicians' ambulatory records during its merger with Medscape/Web MD and as vice president for clinical applications with QuadraMed, managing the patient classification division (formerly known as Medicus Nursing Systems). In various roles with IT vendors, she has been a product manager and installed health system-wide applications for medical information systems.

Donovan earned her MSN from Rush University, Chicago, and her BSN from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has served on the faculty of Dominican University of California, San Rafael, as clinical instructor for nursing and as content specialist/lecturer in nursing re-entry programs.

Hunt has extensive experience managing projects aimed at educating and engaging health care industry executives, physicians, policy makers, employers, and consumers. For the past five years she was director of communications and publishing at the California HealthCare Foundation where she led CHCF's stakeholder, media, and public relation programs, as well as its online publishing. She was involved in the foundation's efforts to accelerate the adoption and use of new information technologies in health care and to drive quality improvement through publicly reported data on hospital and nursing home performance.

Prior to joining CHCF, she served as national director of communications for Kaiser Permanente and as a consultant with the Lewin Group. Before moving to California in 1990 to join Kaiser, she spent 15 years in Washington, D.C., in various capacities including editor of Business and Health magazine; Washington bureau chief for Medical Economics magazine; communications and publishing director for the Group Health Association of America (now known as America's Health Insurance Plans); and co-owner and editor of two nationally-circulated health policy newsletters. Hunt has a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's in communications research from the University of Missouri, Columbia.

To date, CalRHIO has received $1 million grants from Sutter Health, Kaiser Permanente, and the WellPoint Foundation; $450,000 from the California HealthCare Foundation; and $100,000 grants from the University of California Office of the President and Cedars-Sinai Health System. Other financial contributors include Lumetra, John Muir/Mt. Diablo Health System, and Stanford University Medical Center.

For more information visit www.calrhio.org.

Source: Business Wire

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