ONC Staff Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Office of the Nationwide Coordinator is launching a new web site collection that includes ONC staff members named Inside ONC. Inside of ONC will spotlight an inclusive landscape of ONC staff associates, a wide range of positions, and the various backgrounds of those people functioning within just ONC. 

Identify: Carmen Smiley
ONC Place of work: Business of Technologies, Specifications Division
Title: IT Professional

How does your division/place of work suit into ONC?

The Standards Division functions as the principal source for benchmarks examination, improvement, progression, and complex guidance for ONC, federal and condition companions, and other stakeholders across the health and fitness treatment business.

Convey to us about your do the job at ONC.

I direct and coordinate jobs involving client matching and pharmacy interoperability. My perform connects me with all types of folks – from my ONC colleagues to federal companions to several field stakeholders – giving them with guidance, technical guidance, and analysis. I’m also the team guide for Job US@, a new, business-led “tech spec” that could be employed across field for symbolizing patient addresses. You could have not long ago seen me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Standards Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Rapid Identity & Matching Tiger Crew.

What has led you to your job below at ONC?

Though operating at the Indian Wellness Support and Children’s Nationwide Clinic in DC, my colleagues and I confronted significant worries with health and fitness IT adoption, implementation, servicing, examination, reporting, and interoperability. At the similar time, I saw infinite possibilities in what the upcoming could glimpse like for wellbeing data, affected individual matching and document linkage, and other places. While I observed my perform gratifying, I actively sought out chances to support address these challenge and devise alternatives to advance the industry as a full. When I applied to my recent place, it was my 200^th application for a federal work. I leverage that exact perseverance in my function each working day.

What capabilities and strengths do you keep that incorporate worth to your function portfolio?

I’m trained in anthropology, study, and data science, so I have a distinctive skill to see challenges and opportunities from a non-specialized and complex viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, independent, curious, and I adore dilemma solving. I have in excess of 26 years of knowledge in health care and have lived and labored on 4 continents.

What is a get the job done-related accomplishment you are most proud of? & Why?

I’ve had a number of accomplishments above the several years at ONC that I am happy of, but one latest accomplishment is the launch of the Task US@ Technological Specification and Companion Manual in January 2022. The finest feat of Job US@ was not essentially the progress and publication of the specification and manual, but the capacity to coalesce and achieve consensus amongst a wide range of stakeholders on how to seize and signify addresses throughout the field.

What would you say is the very best component of doing the job for ONC?

Some of the most effective sections of doing the job for ONC is the autonomy I have in excess of my work and the capacity to regularly study.

How would you characterize ONC’s results?

I think ONC’s success may perhaps be in the optimistic affect our work has experienced on federal businesses and the field as they do the job towards benchmarks adoption and interoperability.

What is a challenge you are now functioning on and how does it fit into ONC mission?

One particular project that I am doing work on is USCDI as the Client Demographics Facts Course Guide. The USCDI is a standardized established of overall health info lessons and things for nationwide interoperable wellbeing exchange. Considerably of my operate on USCDI entails engaging stakeholders, adjudicating community feedback, conducting investigation, and working to incorporate new, high-value facts features to guidance individual matching and history linkage, id integrity, and fairness. Precise patient matching is a foundational necessity for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC assistance your experienced progress?

I’ve experienced a number of opportunities over the years to take on new projects in places completely unfamiliar to me, lending options to produce interactions with a range of individuals and businesses, see overall health IT from distinct views, get information and competencies, and manual federal partners and other business stakeholders.

What are the main values of ONC that are essential to you?

The ONC main value that may perhaps be most typically applied in practice each day is teamwork. We operate together on a amount of problems that are very sophisticated and for that reason rely on a multidisciplinary crew to fix.  We arrive at our full possible when we work with each other, relying on our individual strengths to accomplish our collective ideal.

Are there any added advantages of doing the job at ONC that you’d like to point out?

The prospect to direct significant get the job done and opportunity to have countrywide affect.