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Consultants

Erin Dickerman

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Erin Dickerman RN, NI-BC, MBA, 
With more than 20 years of experience as a nurse and nursing informatics/technology professional, Mrs. Dickerman began her career in healthcare as a Staff Nurse for Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston in Pediatric Oncology and Hematology. She then worked as an Assistant Nurse Manager in Pediatrics for MD Anderson before shifting her focus to Clinical Informatics with the position of Clinical Informaticist for Methodist Hospital Willowbrook in Houston.  Mrs. Dickerman’s experience in informatics has provided her opportunities to work for many esteemed healthcare institutions including Children’s Health of Dallas, Tenet Healthcare, Texas Children’s Hospital and The Methodist Hospital of Houston.  She also serves as an Adjunct Faculty for the School of Nursing, Health Informatics for Texas Woman’s University and has recently added the title of VP of Marketing and Communications for the DFW HIMSS chapter. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Texas in Austin and Master of Business Administration from Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas.  Mrs. Dickerman is excited to be consulting with the CIHI team.

Judith Douglas

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Judith Douglas did graduate work in the humanities at Northwestern and Yale before earning a master’s degree in public health from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. In her work since, she has served as a developmental editor for multiple titles (Nursing Informatics, Filmless Radiology, Computerizing Large Scale Health Systems, Person-Centered Health Systems: Toward HealthePeople, and more) in the Springer Health Informatics Series, from proposal through production. She has written reports for national groups including the Association of American Medical Colleges; edited special issues for Elsevier’s International Journal of Biomedical Computing and Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine; served on editorial boards for both trade and peer reviewed publications; and published more than sixty articles including PLoS ONE, Epidemics, Malaria Journal, and Health Security.

She has contributed to the literature on electronic health records and its role in creating a new health system. Writing on topics ranging from cancer informatics and clinical trials to nursing informatics and quality care, she has focused on using information technology to improve individual and public health. She has helped to document projects launched to create information architecture frameworks capable of supporting, for example, the translation of research into clinical care, or of de-identified personal health information into population-based health statistics. Her work with the IBM Almaden Research Center as lead technical writer for the Spatiotemporal Epidemic Modeling (STEM) project carried such efforts further, as she documented the development of an open source framework for modeling the spread of diseases across space and time, from influenza, malaria, measles, and dengue fever to Ebola and African swine fever.

Karen Knecht

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Karen Knecht, RN, MSN

Karen Knecht holds a BSN from the University of Texas, Arlington, and an MSN specializing in Nursing Informatics from Texas Tech University. She is an accomplished leader in the fields of healthcare informatics, digital health, and healthcare policy with over 30 years of experience working with major healthcare systems to integrate and use advanced clinical computing across the United States as well as in the U.K and Singapore. Karen serves as a Clinical Advisor to StressPal, an evidence-based wellness program. Her early career was focused on critical care. As Director of the ICU, she was part of the team that opened the Zale Lipshy Hospital (now part of the William P. Clements University Hospital) in Dallas, an early adopter of health information technology. She is a member of the American Nurses Association (ANA) and the American Nursing Informatics Association (ANIA).

Angela McBride

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Dr. Angela McBride is Distinguished Professor and University Dean Emerita at Indiana University School of Nursing. She received her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Georgetown University, her master’s degree in psychiatric-mental health nursing from Yale University, and her PhD in developmental psychology from Purdue University. She is known for her contributions to women’s mental health, particularly the psychology of parenthood, having authored one of the first books to look critically at motherhood in terms of adult development.

In recent years, she has focused her scholarly attention on leadership development, including how the informatics revolution is changing practice. In 2011, her book entitled The Growth and Development of Nurse Leaders won the PROSE Award that year for the category “Nursing and Allied Health” (Prose Awards are the premier awards for outstanding professional and scholarly publishing in the United States); an expanded second edition debuted in 2020. For her contributions, she has been honored with various professional awards, received seven honorary doctorates, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and designated as a “Living Legend” by the American Academy of Nursing.

John Silva

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Dr. John Silva brings extensive experience and skills that he developed in leading and managing complex research initiatives with a combined portfolio in excess of $250 million. For the past 40 years, he has been involved in collaborative research and management positions that have resulted in synergistic relationships and successful, high-impact projects. He architected and deployed the first enterprise information system for managing clinical research in cancer at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).  He also built the biological warfare defense program and developed the first models for the biological effects of bioweapons for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  Dr. Silva implemented the first syndromic surveillance system that supported CDC epidemiologists. Most recently at the Department of Defense, he was the architect of a cloud biosurveillance system that generated intelligence for analysts from multiple sources.