ONC Staff Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Business of the Countrywide Coordinator is launching a new blog site collection that includes ONC staff members referred to as Inside ONC. Within ONC will emphasize an inclusive landscape of ONC staff members associates, a selection of positions, and the diverse backgrounds of people doing work inside of ONC. 

Title: Carmen Smiley
ONC Workplace: Office of Engineering, Benchmarks Division
Title: IT Specialist

How does your division/office fit into ONC?

The Expectations Division acts as the primary source for requirements analysis, progress, advancement, and complex support for ONC, federal and point out partners, and other stakeholders throughout the overall health treatment business.

Convey to us about your function at ONC.

I lead and coordinate initiatives involving patient matching and pharmacy interoperability. My operate connects me with all sorts of men and women – from my ONC colleagues to federal partners to various business stakeholders – supplying them with advice, technical guidance, and investigation. I’m also the personnel direct for Project US@, a new, industry-led “tech spec” that could be utilised across industry for representing individual addresses. You may well have not too long ago witnessed me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Criteria Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Quick Id & Matching Tiger Crew.

What has led you to your vocation here at ONC?

While working at the Indian Wellness Provider and Children’s National Medical center in DC, my colleagues and I confronted major challenges with well being IT adoption, implementation, servicing, assessment, reporting, and interoperability. At the exact time, I saw endless opportunities in what the future could appear like for overall health data, affected individual matching and report linkage, and other parts. Though I observed my get the job done satisfying, I actively sought out possibilities to support deal with these obstacle and devise remedies to advance the business as a total. When I applied to my latest placement, it was my 200^th software for a federal work. I leverage that identical perseverance in my perform each individual working day.

What skills and strengths do you keep that insert value to your work portfolio?

I’m qualified in anthropology, study, and facts science, so I have a exceptional capacity to see problems and prospects from a non-technological and technical viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, unbiased, curious, and I appreciate difficulty fixing. I have more than 26 a long time of working experience in healthcare and have lived and labored on four continents.

What is a perform-similar accomplishment you’re most happy of? & Why?

I have had numerous accomplishments around the many years at ONC that I am very pleased of, but a single modern accomplishment is the release of the Project US@ Technical Specification and Companion Guide in January 2022. The greatest feat of Task US@ wasn’t always the progress and publication of the specification and manual, but the ability to coalesce and realize consensus amid a huge array of stakeholders on how to seize and signify addresses throughout the marketplace.

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

Some of the best components of performing for ONC is the autonomy I have over my work and the capability to continuously discover.

How would you characterize ONC’s achievements?

I believe ONC’s accomplishment may perhaps be in the optimistic effect our operate has experienced on federal organizations and the industry as they get the job done towards expectations adoption and interoperability.

What is a challenge you are now working on and how does it in good shape into ONC mission?

Just one venture that I am performing on is USCDI as the Patient Demographics Details Course Direct. The USCDI is a standardized set of wellbeing info courses and things for nationwide interoperable wellbeing trade. Significantly of my perform on USCDI requires engaging stakeholders, adjudicating community opinions, conducting analysis, and working to incorporate new, substantial-price details factors to guidance affected individual matching and record linkage, identity integrity, and fairness. Accurate affected person matching is a foundational necessity for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC guidance your specialist enhancement?

I’ve had various possibilities more than the several years to choose on new tasks in parts entirely unfamiliar to me, lending possibilities to build interactions with a assortment of people today and businesses, see health IT from different perspectives, acquire information and abilities, and guide federal partners and other field stakeholders.

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

The ONC main worth that may perhaps be most usually applied in exercise every single working day is teamwork. We perform jointly on a number of difficulties that are really complex and consequently rely on a multidisciplinary crew to solve.  We access our full probable when we perform jointly, relying on our specific strengths to realize our collective best.

Are there any supplemental rewards of doing work at ONC that you’d like to mention?

The opportunity to lead meaningful perform and likely to have national effects.