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Authors:
Patricia C. Dykes, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI
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Special Message from the AMIA President and Board Chair
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I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself as your new Board Chair. For those who don’t know me, my name is Patti Dykes, and I am honored and privileged to represent you, the AMIA membership.

As you know, informatics is a dynamic field. We all came to informatics in different ways, but we all share the same vision.

Prior to my career in informatics, I was a clinical nurse specialist, but I had an interest in quality improvement and clinical pathways. I realized early that decision support was needed at the bedside to improve the likelihood that patients would receive optimal care, and this led me in the direction of informatics.

I studied informatics as a doctoral student at Columbia University and completed my dissertation on integration of heart failure clinical practice guidelines into an electronic health record to improve interdisciplinary guideline adherence. It was there that I was mentored by Suzanne Bakken. After graduation. I worked with Blackford Middleton in the Clinical Informatics Research and Development group at Partners HealthCare.

Since 2011, I have been working with David Bates as Research Program Director in the Center for Patient Safety, Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I am also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Advancing informatics remains paramount, and we can’t do it without your invaluable expertise. There are many exciting things AMIA is working on to move forward in 2020: a website refresh, expanded public policy offerings, health informatics certification, continued success of our conferences and new educational offerings.

To ensure our success, we have convened a task force that will engage with our members in the strategic visioning process for our 2020-2025 strategic plan. We are aligning that process with the CEO leadership search and governance restructuring. This term we also welcome five new faces to the Board of Directors: Lynda Hoeksema, Philip Payne, Victoria Tiase, Anne Turner and Li Zhou.

AMIA has been my professional home since my years as a doctoral student. From the beginning, my AMIA membership provided an opportunity to connect, learn, grow and lead. I have served in many different member roles. In each of these roles, I strived to increase the visibility of AMIA and the work of its members in using informatics to transform health care.

I know I can speak for the Board when I say we are honored to serve AMIA and its members first. It is important to me that we remain committed to transparency between the AMIA Board and you, the AMIA membership. I will provide regular updates to our members after Board meetings and throughout my term. Your voice is being heard.

I have had the pleasure of working with some of you in the past, and I hope to work with more of you during my term as we continue to advance health care through the science and practice of informatics. AMIA is YOUR community. The opportunities to Connect, Learn, Grow and Lead are just around the corner.

Please reach out to me or any of our board members with questions, concerns, and your suggestions for AMIA’s role as we work to advance health care through informatics.