By Eric Thrailkill, TN HIMSS Chapter President and Vice President/Chief Information Officer of AMSURG
As we near the end of June 2019, and the end of the HIMSS fiscal year (HIMSS fiscal year runs July 1 to June 30), I wanted to pass on a few reflections of the past six months and anticipations of activities through December 31st, as follows:
- We kicked off 2019 with a Strategic Planning Retreat in January with particular focus in four areas – Board engagement, community collaboration, committee structure and the Summit of the Southeast (“SOSE”). I’m pleased to report we’ve made progress from planning to action in all four areas.
- The Chapter was well represented at HIMSS19 in Orlando, with over 800 Chapter members attending. Our Member Reception at The Pub was attended by over 300 individuals and, of course, we won the coveted Chapter of the Year Award and watched Tommy Lewis accept the Chapter Leader of the Year Award.
- The Programs Committee put together two solid events – one in collaboration with the AMA focused on digital health innovation and the second on contemporary trends in Cybersecurity. The education, engagement and participation of our members and the opportunity to network are key components of an enhanced member benefit – on full display at these two events.
- TN HIMSS sponsored the healthcare jobs report published by the NTC and MTSU and participated on a panel featuring trends in health and healthcare information technology.
- Our Spring graduates of the HIT Accelerator program provided individual presentations on key learnings and takeaways from this 14 week session – taught by a who’s who representation of community leaders.
- The Chapter hosted two CIO Dinners – both completely sold out and both highly engaging discussions of Epic implementations (Kevin Johnson, MD and Haden McWhorter) and health system consolidation, integration and value creation (Al Smith and Christopher Rehm, MD).
- I’m pleased to report we’ll end the year ahead of our budget and ahead of our results of 2018. I’m proud of our annual, event and HIT Accelerator sponsors and our 30 Board Members are extremely grateful of the financial contribution, as well as the contribution to thought leadership, these sponsors provide.
- The TN HIMSS BOD will be voting on a slate of five well-qualified leaders in the Chapter to join the Board of Directors commencing July 1, 2019.
- On July 18th, please join us for a new member reception at HCTec in Brentwood. We’ll be providing in-depth details of our committee structure and looking for active, engaged members to join us.
- On September 9th and 10th, TN HIMSS will be presenting the first ever healthcare track at the NTC Analytics Summit. Our team has put together excellent sessions focused on analytics that you won’t want to miss. TN HIMSS members receive a 15% discount to the two day event.
- In October, we’ll be hosting an event dedicated to behavioral health featuring a panel deep in experience using technology and analytics to drive programs and services. The event will be held at AMSURG.
- Of course, our Holiday Reception will be December 17th at Muggiano’s Little Italy in Nashville.
I couldn’t me more grateful for our Executive Director, Tiffany Madigan, our Leadership Team, Committee Chairs, Ambassadors, Annual Sponsors and Board of Directors, for their personal contribution and leadership to allow this Chapter to fulfill our mission – “improving health with information and technology” and creating the conversation occurring daily to move this industry forward.
We all look forward to seeing you soon.
Happy Summer!