ONC Staff Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Workplace of the Countrywide Coordinator is launching a new web site collection that includes ONC workers known as Within ONC. Inside of ONC will spotlight an inclusive landscape of ONC workers customers, a wide variety of positions, and the assorted backgrounds of those working in just ONC. 

Identify: Carmen Smiley
ONC Workplace: Place of work of Technologies, Expectations Division
Title: IT Professional

How does your division/office environment in shape into ONC?

The Specifications Division functions as the major source for criteria examination, growth, progression, and specialized support for ONC, federal and state associates, and other stakeholders throughout the health care industry.

Tell us about your operate at ONC.

I direct and coordinate tasks involving client matching and pharmacy interoperability. My get the job done connects me with all kinds of persons – from my ONC colleagues to federal associates to numerous market stakeholders – delivering them with steerage, specialized assistance, and research. I’m also the workers lead for Project US@, a new, sector-led “tech spec” that could be applied throughout marketplace for representing affected individual addresses. You could have just lately seen me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Specifications Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Fast Identity & Matching Tiger Workforce.

What has led you to your occupation listed here at ONC?

Even though functioning at the Indian Health and fitness Company and Children’s Countrywide Hospital in DC, my colleagues and I faced major troubles with overall health IT adoption, implementation, maintenance, analysis, reporting, and interoperability. At the exact same time, I noticed limitless options in what the potential could seem like for wellbeing data, affected individual matching and history linkage, and other parts. While I observed my function rewarding, I actively sought out options to assist address these problem and devise options to advance the marketplace as a entire. When I utilized to my existing situation, it was my 200^th software for a federal task. I leverage that very same perseverance in my work each and every day.

What competencies and strengths do you hold that insert benefit to your work portfolio?

I’m trained in anthropology, analysis, and knowledge science, so I have a unique capacity to see challenges and alternatives from a non-technical and specialized viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, independent, curious, and I like dilemma resolving. I have in excess of 26 years of knowledge in health care and have lived and labored on 4 continents.

What is a do the job-linked accomplishment you’re most very pleased of? & Why?

I’ve had quite a few achievements about the decades at ONC that I am proud of, but one the latest accomplishment is the launch of the Challenge US@ Technical Specification and Companion Tutorial in January 2022. The greatest feat of Project US@ was not essentially the progress and publication of the specification and guideline, but the capability to coalesce and attain consensus amid a broad vary of stakeholders on how to capture and stand for addresses throughout the market.

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

Some of the ideal sections of doing the job for ONC is the autonomy I have in excess of my function and the potential to frequently discover.

How would you characterize ONC’s achievement?

I believe ONC’s achievement could be in the beneficial influence our work has had on federal businesses and the market as they work toward requirements adoption and interoperability.

What is a challenge you are at this time performing on and how does it fit into ONC mission?

A single challenge that I am doing work on is USCDI as the Individual Demographics Facts Class Lead. The USCDI is a standardized established of well being facts courses and things for nationwide interoperable wellness trade. A great deal of my function on USCDI entails participating stakeholders, adjudicating general public reviews, conducting investigation, and doing work to insert new, substantial-value details features to aid affected person matching and file linkage, identification integrity, and fairness. Exact affected individual matching is a foundational necessity for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC support your expert improvement?

I have had several opportunities in excess of the years to get on new tasks in parts fully unfamiliar to me, lending options to produce relationships with a wide range of men and women and organizations, see well being IT from distinctive views, gain knowledge and skills, and information federal partners and other business stakeholders.

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

The ONC main benefit that may perhaps be most usually applied in exercise each individual working day is teamwork. We perform jointly on a variety of troubles that are incredibly elaborate and thus count on a multidisciplinary staff to clear up.  We get to our total probable when we function alongside one another, relying on our individual strengths to reach our collective very best.

Are there any supplemental positive aspects of doing the job at ONC that you’d like to mention?

The possibility to guide significant do the job and probable to have national effects.