Introduction: Tonya Hongsermeie, HCLSig co-chair from Partners Healthcare

Hi,
I'm one of the co-chairs of HCLSig along with Eric Neumann.  I'm very much
looking forward to working with all of you to see how we can get better traction
in the deployment of semantic web technologies.  My interest in this area is
pretty recent.  I've worked for 10 years in the Health Information Technology
field, first with a clinical guideline company and then with Cerner Corporation
in clinical knowledge management .  My early interests were in finding ways to
make the quality of healthcare tangible.  When I was practicing in the early
90s, managed care was rapidly commoditizing healthcare.  Data acquisition to
measure the quality of care remains a challenge today.  While at Cerner, I also
became interested in how to solve the challenges of knowledge acquisition and
deployment in support of clinical care, trials and research.  You can see from
the case description at the HCLSig Applications and Demonstrations web-site
http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swls/#partners how we are approaching these challenges
at Partners.  I work with great people at Partners such as Vipul Kashyap, our
senior medical informatician and Partners AC, as well as people from the Harvard
Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics such as Isaac Kohane, Mollie Ullman
Cullere, Sandy Aronson, and Dr. Raju Kucherlapati.  We have come to increasingly
see that semantic web technologies will be a key enabler for innovation
discovery and adoption.  Our approach has been, by necessity, pragmatic because
we are deploying clinical decision support systems in a heterogenous, legacy
environment utilized by thousands of clinicians across Partners Healthcare.
When I met Eric Neumann a couple of years ago at a conference, in our
discussions we came to realize that Life Sciences and Healthcare do share
similar challenges in the capture of observations, interpretation of data, and
decision making.  While there are strong distinctions in the technology
requirements, there are also similarities and shared knowledge bases.  We hope
that by bringing together these constituencies, that we can both support the use
of semantic web technologies for the unique needs of research and clinical care
as well as identify the bridging requirements for translating R&D knowledge into
clinical practice.   

Best
Tonya



Tonya Hongsermeier, MD, MBA
Corporate Manager, 
Clinical Knowledge Management and Decision Support

Partners HealthCare System
Clinical Informatics Research and Development
93 Worcester Street, PO Box 81905
Wellesley, MA 02481
P: 781.416.9219     Mobile: 617.717.8711
Fax: 781.416.8912

Received on Friday, 9 December 2005 09:11:14 UTC