ONC Staff Profiles – Carmen Smiley

The Business office of the Nationwide Coordinator is launching a new site series featuring ONC team named Within ONC. Inside of ONC will highlight an inclusive landscape of ONC employees users, a variety of positions, and the numerous backgrounds of people doing work in just ONC. 

Title: Carmen Smiley
ONC Workplace: Workplace of Technological innovation, Specifications Division
Title: IT Expert

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

The Requirements Division acts as the key useful resource for benchmarks investigation, growth, advancement, and complex guidance for ONC, federal and state associates, and other stakeholders throughout the wellness care marketplace.

Notify us about your function at ONC.

I guide and coordinate tasks involving affected person matching and pharmacy interoperability. My function connects me with all sorts of people today – from my ONC colleagues to federal partners to different business stakeholders – providing them with guidance, technological assistance, and investigate. I’m also the staff direct for Job US@, a new, sector-led “tech spec” that could be applied across business for representing individual addresses. You may possibly have a short while ago witnessed me presenting to the HITAC Interoperability Standards Workgroup, the USCDI Workgroup, or the Speedy Identification & Matching Tiger Team.

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

Even though functioning at the Indian Overall health Service and Children’s Nationwide Clinic in DC, my colleagues and I confronted sizeable difficulties with wellness IT adoption, implementation, upkeep, assessment, reporting, and interoperability. At the very same time, I saw countless options in what the long run could appear like for overall health facts, affected person matching and record linkage, and other regions. Even though I observed my perform rewarding, I actively sought out possibilities to support address these challenge and devise answers to advance the marketplace as a complete. When I applied to my existing placement, it was my 200^th software for a federal position. I leverage that same perseverance in my do the job each working day.

What skills and strengths do you maintain that include price to your work portfolio?

I’m properly trained in anthropology, exploration, and knowledge science, so I have a distinctive capacity to see challenges and opportunities from a non-technical and specialized viewpoint. I’m also hyper analytical, imaginative, impartial, curious, and I love challenge resolving. I have around 26 many years of expertise in healthcare and have lived and worked on four continents.

What is a operate-similar accomplishment you’re most proud of? & Why?

I have had a number of achievements around the years at ONC that I am proud of, but a single the latest accomplishment is the launch of the Task US@ Technical Specification and Companion Manual in January 2022. The finest feat of Undertaking US@ wasn’t always the progress and publication of the specification and manual, but the capability to coalesce and accomplish consensus among the a large range of stakeholders on how to capture and stand for addresses across the business.

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

Some of the very best components of doing work for ONC is the autonomy I have over my work and the capability to constantly study.

How would you characterize ONC’s achievement?

I think ONC’s good results may well be in the positive impact our function has experienced on federal organizations and the business as they work toward benchmarks adoption and interoperability.

What is a challenge you are currently performing on and how does it healthy into ONC mission?

One project that I am working on is USCDI as the Affected person Demographics Data Course Direct. The USCDI is a standardized set of overall health data classes and things for nationwide interoperable wellness exchange. Much of my get the job done on USCDI consists of partaking stakeholders, adjudicating community reviews, conducting investigate, and functioning to include new, high-price knowledge elements to help affected individual matching and document linkage, identity integrity, and fairness. Exact client matching is a foundational prerequisite for nationwide interoperability.

How does ONC support your expert advancement?

I’ve had numerous prospects more than the several years to just take on new initiatives in locations wholly unfamiliar to me, lending chances to create relationships with a wide range of people today and organizations, see wellness IT from unique perspectives, attain knowledge and capabilities, and guideline federal associates and other market stakeholders.

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

The ONC main value that may perhaps be most often utilized in follow every single day is teamwork. We do the job alongside one another on a number of troubles that are really elaborate and for that reason depend on a multidisciplinary team to remedy.  We access our comprehensive probable when we work collectively, relying on our unique strengths to accomplish our collective best.

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

The option to lead meaningful perform and prospective to have nationwide impression.