ONC Staff Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Business office of the Nationwide Coordinator is launching a new weblog collection featuring ONC workers called Within ONC. Within ONC will highlight an inclusive landscape of ONC workers associates, a wide variety of positions, and the assorted backgrounds of people doing the job inside ONC. 

Name: Carmen Smiley
ONC Office environment: Workplace of Technology, Requirements Division
Title: IT Professional

How does your division/business suit into ONC?

The Benchmarks Division acts as the main useful resource for specifications analysis, growth, advancement, and technological aid for ONC, federal and condition partners, and other stakeholders across the well being care field.

Inform us about your do the job at ONC.

I lead and coordinate initiatives involving individual matching and pharmacy interoperability. My get the job done connects me with all sorts of folks – from my ONC colleagues to federal partners to a variety of sector stakeholders – furnishing them with assistance, technical support, and study. I’m also the staff lead for Job US@, a new, marketplace-led “tech spec” that could be applied throughout field for symbolizing individual addresses. You could have a short while ago observed me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Requirements Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Quickly Id & Matching Tiger Workforce.

What has led you to your profession below at ONC?

While working at the Indian Well being Services and Children’s National Healthcare facility in DC, my colleagues and I confronted considerable difficulties with health and fitness IT adoption, implementation, routine maintenance, analysis, reporting, and interoperability. At the exact same time, I observed endless options in what the long term could search like for well being knowledge, client matching and document linkage, and other parts. Whilst I located my do the job worthwhile, I actively sought out prospects to help address these problem and devise options to advance the sector as a full. When I applied to my existing situation, it was my 200^th software for a federal work. I leverage that very same perseverance in my do the job each individual working day.

What expertise and strengths do you hold that insert price to your work portfolio?

I’m educated in anthropology, investigation, and details science, so I have a distinctive capability to see difficulties and possibilities from a non-technical and technical viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, independent, curious, and I enjoy dilemma fixing. I have more than 26 years of practical experience in healthcare and have lived and labored on 4 continents.

What is a perform-associated accomplishment you’re most very pleased of? & Why?

I’ve had various achievements about the years at ONC that I am happy of, but a single the latest accomplishment is the launch of the Challenge US@ Specialized Specification and Companion Information in January 2022. The best feat of Project US@ was not essentially the enhancement and publication of the specification and tutorial, but the skill to coalesce and reach consensus among the a extensive selection of stakeholders on how to capture and characterize addresses throughout the marketplace.

What would you say is the best section of functioning for ONC?

Some of the very best areas of doing work for ONC is the autonomy I have above my do the job and the potential to regularly learn.

How would you characterize ONC’s achievements?

I consider ONC’s achievements may perhaps be in the good impression our work has had on federal organizations and the marketplace as they function toward criteria adoption and interoperability.

What is a project you are at present functioning on and how does it fit into ONC mission?

Just one challenge that I am performing on is USCDI as the Affected person Demographics Details Class Lead. The USCDI is a standardized set of wellness details courses and components for nationwide interoperable health exchange. Considerably of my work on USCDI requires participating stakeholders, adjudicating general public responses, conducting research, and operating to incorporate new, superior-worth facts elements to help individual matching and document linkage, identity integrity, and fairness. Exact affected individual matching is a foundational need for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC support your qualified progress?

I’ve experienced several possibilities around the several years to just take on new tasks in locations absolutely unfamiliar to me, lending options to produce associations with a variety of individuals and businesses, see health IT from distinctive views, get know-how and skills, and guide federal associates and other industry stakeholders.

What are the core values of ONC that are significant to you?

The ONC main worth that could be most frequently utilized in observe every day is teamwork. We operate jointly on a range of complications that are quite intricate and for that reason count on a multidisciplinary staff to solve.  We achieve our comprehensive likely when we do the job with each other, relying on our person strengths to accomplish our collective finest.

Are there any further rewards of functioning at ONC that you’d like to point out?

The chance to direct meaningful get the job done and potential to have countrywide affect.