Message from the President

The HIMSS SoCal Chapter is looking forward to an exciting year of events after kicking off with our 8th Annual Golf tournament. We expect to resume our in-person events and attendance using the lessons from the past year, providing a virtual presence to extend the reach of our sessions throughout Southern California and to other chapters associated with our National HIMSS affiliates. We have a dynamic Chapter Board for the 2021-2022 year. Please allow me to introduce to them all:

Executive Board Members

• Christian Aboujaoude - Vice President, Programs
• Midori Kondo, PharmD - Vice President, Finance & President-Elect
• Geri Pavia - Immediate Past President
• Shivani Sharma - Vice President, Administration
• Ian Slade - Vice President, Advocacy

Committee Chairs

• Regina Atim, PharmD, MBA, BCMAS – Chair, Academic Alliance Committee
• Don Boatright – Chair, Sponsorship Committee
• C'Mone Byrd – Chair, Marketing & Communications Committee
• Carrie Murray - Co-Chair, Programs
• Paul Butler - Podcast Chair
• Ernesto Santana – Chair, Membership Committee
• Alan S. Young, MD, MBA, PMP – Chair, CMIO Committee

My message for this year is to "Focus on lifting our membership through activities and events that support their growth and career potential."

I first volunteered with the HIMSS National organization in 2009 to learn more about the profession of health IT. The HIMSS organization exposed me to a career in health IT and the possibilities of interacting with my peers. The more I learned about the professional aspect of my job, the more I wanted to invest in myself. So I am working with our Chapter leaders on a strategy that aligns with this vision. We will work on producing activities and events that focus on these three themes:

• Career Tracks with Professional Advisors
• Advisory Board for Innovation
• Roadmap for Succession Planning

We want to hear from you, the members, on topics and activities to engage you to participate in our local HIMSS chapter. So join us by participating this year, learning something new about health information technology, and investing in yourself! We will accomplish this by creating activities for members and individuals, such as students, to hear from professionals working in roles that you want to hear and learn about.

Best Regards,

LeRoy Smith
President, HIMSS Southern California Chapter

Committee Updates

Our HIMSS SoCal Board members want to share with you the plans we have for this year and invite you to join us. We are actively seeking co-chairs and members for all our committees.

Programs

Vice President - Christian Aboujaoude
Programs Co-chair – Carrie Murray

The HIMSS SoCal Chapter promotes innovation in its programming. This year will likely continue to be mostly virtual with the ongoing limitation impacting in-person events.  We will plan accordingly with our “new normal” to achieve our goals with a series of virtual, limited face-to-face and hybrid events.

We are designing a calendar of events that appeals to our membership meeting our educational and networking mission using a hybrid approach. Events in the works include a virtual HIT series with several sessions, outreach events targeting counties not usually reached by our in-person events, and an in-person CXO event in the spring. In addition, we’re planning networking events at HIMSS22, at the CXO event, and for CMIOs. 

Finance

President-Elect, Acting Treasurer - Midori Kondo

The chapter financial goal is to maintain financial viability and growth to sustain chapter activities. The finance committee will maintain best practices by ensuring all events are budgeted and analyzed with VP of programs to determine financial viability of the event; ensure sponsorship is engaged with aggressively finding monies to support our events; and hold chairs accountable to financial performance of their committees.

Advocacy

Vice President - Ian Slade

The Advocacy Committee is a joint effort between the Southern and Northern California chapters. Our action plan for this fiscal year includes recruiting more members and partnering with the Academic Alliance Committee. Our annual Advocacy Day highlights legislative developments in HIT locally, statewide, and nationally. We will continue alerting members to legislative “Call-to-Action” activities and attending monthly National HIMSS calls. As the National Chair, Ian will also lead the national monthly calls and office hours and continue a partnership with the India chapter.

Marketing & Communications

Chair - C'Mone Byrd

To run a successful marketing and communications program, participation is needed from all Committee Chairs and Board members. Our goal is to provide a full suite of communication channels by which HIMSS SoCal members will learn about educational programming and volunteer opportunities provided by the chapter. To accomplish this we will recruit a co-chair, encourage committee chairs and board members to share their plans, events and impact in our newsletter articles. We will expand social media outreach and fully involve marketing in event planning to ensure content is created and shared in advance to maximize membership involvement.

Sponsorship

Chair - Don Boatright

We are immensely grateful for the many current and past sponsors who have enabled us to provide excellent programming. The Sponsorship committee will communicate our sponsorship packages with full transparency ensuring our sponsors understand what they receive for their investment. Our goal is to facilitate and support sponsors to have an outstanding experience and share their feedback so we can continually improve on our packages and our events.

Academic Alliance

Chair - Regina Atim

The Academic Alliance Committee supports Health IT students and advancing professionals by integrating students at events and promoting volunteerism and community engagement. This year we look forward to a return to student engagement at virtual and in-person conferences. We will continue to offer our highly popular and beneficial career roundtable events, create a Slack group to allow students to interact and collaborate, and seek to increase membership on the committee.

Membership

Chair - Ernesto Santana

The Membership Committee this year plans to promote membership in our chapter by collaborating with Programs, Academic Alliance and Marketing by highlighting workforce development and student opportunities.

CMIO

Chair - Alan Young

The CMIO Committee plans to re-engage with the local SoCal clinical leadership through discussion around clinical informatics, innovation and health IT. The goal for 2021-2022 is to revitalize the network through a live in-person event or hybrid events focused on the CMIO/physician community. The plan is to host at least one live mixer for the physician community and nominate a physician speaker for an upcoming podcast.

Podcast

Chair - Paul Butler

The HIMSS SoCal’s topical/guest interview podcast has 700 subscribers, with the most popular episodes having almost 900 downloads. A total of 42 episodes have been produced and published since 2017. Our continuing goal is to promote timely education sessions and discussions to support our membership in gaining knowledge needed to be successful in their professional environments. This year we plan to feature several experts in a series on innovation and produce specialty series on a variety of current HIT topics.

8th Annual Golf Charity Tournament

Photo Album

Changemaker Award

Congratulations to the Southern California and Northern California Chapters joint Advocacy Committee on being recognized as a Changemaker for FY21.