Chapter Leadership 2023-2024

 

President Viveka Rydell-Andersonnorcal.president@himsschapter.org
Past President (FY23)Sofia Chancey 
SecretaryJeff Hawleynorcal.info@himsschapter.org
TreasurerEmily Lynorcal.treasurer@himsschapter.org
Advocacy CommitteeChair: Larry Ozerannorcal.advocacy@himsschapter.org
Education CommitteeChair: Eugene Pozdnikovnorcal.education@himsschapter.org
Membership Committee

Chair: Dipty Desai

 
Marketing CommitteeChair: Estelle Tournas 
 

Vice Chair: Vrushali Malpekar

 
Programs CommitteeChair: Christina Moratonorcal.events@himsschapter.org
Sponsorship Committee

Chair: Suman Mishra
Past Chair: Evan Kapaun

norcal.sponsorship@himsschapter.org

 

Chapter Leadership Bios


Viveka Rydell-Anderson, JD, MSc, President

An experienced lawyer, healthcare executive and champion of health equity, Viveka Rydell-Anderson, JD, MSc knows that great people and digital healthcare solutions are needed to best serve patients, families, clinicians, care teams, and medical researchers. Viveka pioneers new projects to improve access to patient-centered quality healthcare for all, working with diverse partners to redesign our fragmented healthcare ecosystem. She is passionate about the role of tech and innovation to improve healthcare. 

She has experience standing up innovative healthcare models and making them viable, working across government, private industry, and philanthropy. For 14 years she was CEO of PDI Surgery, a nonprofit Ambulatory Surgery Center providing specialty care (dental treatment under general anesthesia) to children and special needs patients from 33 Northern California counties. She is currently CEO of Pacific Vision Foundation, an innovative social impact model creating eye care access for all, regardless of ability to pay, and the Advisor to DAYA, a Swedish FemTech digital health incubator. 

She earned an MSc in Clinical Informatics Management from Stanford and received her JD from UC Berkeley Law School. 

Originally from Sweden, Viveka has also lived in Denmark, Germany, and Holland. She is a mother of three and loves poetry, baking, yoga, hiking, backpacking, skiing, and running.


Sofia Chancey, Past President

Sofia is an accomplished executive with over 22 years of success in the healthcare, technology, and telecommunications industries in the US and Australia. Leveraging extensive experience as a liaison between technology departments and business teams, she is a valuable asset for established and growth businesses aiming to incorporate technology for market disruption.

Sofia is a co-founder of Pangalo Group, a strategy and learning studio. Passion Persuades is our ethos, underpinning everything we do, fueling our expertise to build innovative, inclusive and culturally diverse teams. Prior to co-founding Pangalo Group, Sofia was a Managing Director with Accenture focusing on clients in Healthcare and Public Service.

Sofia holds a Bachelors of Science in Nursing degree and started her career in the cardiovascular intensive care unit at Order of Saint Francis Medical Center in Illinois.
 

Jeff Hawley, Secretary

Jeff has been a member of HIMSS since 1997 and a member of the NorCal Chapter Board for 20 years. He has been an officer of the Chapter for 15 years, having served as President twice, Treasurer four times and Secretary twice. He has served on various committees as member and Chairperson and is currently the Secretary. In addition, he has been a reviewer and moderator for the National HIMSS Education Committee for 5 years. Jeff served on the Chapter Leader Task force for HIMSS National for 5 years, culminating in serving as Chair of this National Committee. He has been a HIMSS Fellow since 2010.  

He is a seasoned health care professional with a combined background in clinical laboratory medicine, information technology, healthcare vendor experience and IT Healthcare consulting. Jeff is a Clinical Laboratory Scientist by training, including clinical and anatomic pathology. He has served as Director of a hospital-based clinical laboratory, CIO of a community faith-based hospital, Director of Sales and Support for a national healthcare software vendor and healthcare consultant with extensive national and international experience managing numerous IT system selections, implementations, strategy, planning, mergers and acquisitions, assessments and IT system transformations. He has worked with large academic medical centers and integrated delivery systems, community hospitals, federal and state-level institutions and government health ministries in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland and Chile.

Jeff is a Principal with Impact Advisors, a Best in KLAS consulting firm specializing in strategic advisory and implementation services in the healthcare IT arena.
 

Emily Ly, Treasurer

Emily joined the HIMSS NorCal Chapter in 2020 as a student member and volunteer. She actively engaged in planning and hosting the e-Patient summit conference in February 2021 and the Virtual Career Expo 2022 in January 2022. She is currently the Call Center Supervisor for the UCSF Primary Care Department focusing on streamlining patient access to preventive care.

Emily graduated from San Jose State University where she studied Public Health and recently obtained her Master’s in Health Administration from University of Southern California. Emily has over five years of experience in the medical field and is passionate about making healthcare more accessible for patients who are non-affluent in English.


Larry Ozeran, MD, FAMIA, Advocacy Committee Chair

Larry Ozeran, MD, FAMIA, has more than 20 years of experience with information technology and software development, patient care delivery, healthcare leadership, and health policy.

Dr. Ozeran was officially recognized by the State of California for his assistance in the State's response to ARRA that secured $38M for interoperability. He has written HIMSS blogs and published book chapters for HIMSS on privacy and for AMIA on HIT process failures. Dr. Ozeran has responded to federal Notices of Proposed Rule Making (with AMIA, HIMSS, and independently), written to many elected officials, and testified before committees of the State Senate and Assembly. He was an invited speaker before the Congressional Budget Office as Vice Chair of the HIMSS Public Policy Committee and served twice on the AMIA Public Policy Committee.

As a strategic consultant, he advises clients on strategy, policy and innovation.
 

Eugene Pozdnikov, Education Committee Chair

Eugene is an established technical and operational leader with cross-domain expertise in healthcare, life sciences, logistics and telecommunications. He has been instrumental in building and delivering solutions in these verticals, starting from strategy, through solution ideation, hands-on development and final market rollout. In over two decades he had the opportunity to work in the U.S. and internationally, with enterprise clients and partners like Nokia, Siemens, AstraZeneca, Google, etc., as well as multiple start-up entities, where he shaped and delivered new products to market.

Eugene is currently co-founder and CEO of CYBX (www.cybx.io), an innovative healthcare IT entity focused on care collaboration and improving quality of care, leveraging interoperability, intelligent workflow and AI. He started volunteering with HIMSS in 2022 and is currently leading the NorCal chapter’s educational initiatives.
 

Dipty Desai, Membership Committee Chair

Dipty attended Stanford University as a Postdoctoral Fellow and obtained her Doctorate from UCSF. She is the CEO of CareAsOne whose goal is to bring the ecosystem in healthcare together to help drdive the quadruple aim in healthcare through the use of data and technology.

She is also on the board of IIT BayArea Alumni Organization which serves the alumni of the most prestigious engineering college in India and is also on the board of TiE with 60 chapters across the globe to serve entrepeneurs and connect them to investors and customers.

Dipty is also a Venture Partner for Elevate.VC and Excelerate.it. She hosts a Future of Health podcase and convenes webinars and summits for Digital Health. She was the convener for TIEcon two years in a row which brings in more than 10,000 attendees from across the globe and also convened an Xcelerate health summit at Stanford.

Dipty has volunteered for the HIMSS Northern Califonia organization since 2021. She has worked closely with the past HIMSS NorCal president on the networking events hosted for the bay area members. Dipty enjoys working collaboratively to cultivate relationships and develop opportunities that can enable HIMSS members and affiliate healthcare organizations to expand their expertise and professional networks. 
 

Estelle Tournas, Marketing Committee Chair

Estelle has 30 years of healthcare IT experience. She was Clinical Information Systems (CIS) Manager at The Cambridge Health Alliance, where she led an EHR implementation throughout the organization's clinical and administrative areas. She has eightShe is currently Director of Marketing and Healthcare IT Consultant at HealthNET Systems Consulting, Inc. She has been involved with HIMSS for more than a decade, and became CPHIMS certified in 2016. She holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts, and began volunteering for the HIMSS NorCal Marketing Committee in 2022 to help organize in-person events in the greater Sacramento area. 
 

Christina Morato, Programs Committee Chair 

Christina has been part of the UCSF Medical Center team for 22 years. She is a Senior Analyst Supervisor and Tableau Developer. She graduated from San Francisco State University with her degree in Kinesiology. She began volunteering for the HIMSS NorCal Chapter in 2022.

 

 

 


Suman Mishra, Sponsorship Committee Chair

Suman Mishra has 25+ years of rich experience in Healthcare, Financial and Pharmaceutical industries. Suman is a well-recognized leader for his many contributions to the healthcare and technology arena.

For the past 16 years, he has led many healthcare initiatives that have had a profound impact on technology modernization and member health outcomes. Some of his key accomplishments include establishment of a Medicare Advantage Encounter Data Submission platform, enterprise cloud migration, rolling out symptom checker chatbots in six regions and the establishment of Health Condition Management solution to manage and improve members’ chronic and episodic conditions. Suman’s current focus has been on usage of AI in building healthcare solutions. Suman assumed several key leadership positions in Kaiser Permanente. He is now the CTO of GAVS technologies that is focused on Healthcare transformation.

Suman holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology, and his passion to transform the healthcare industry stems from his family, who are medical professionals (his mother is an opthalmologist, and his father, a pediatrician). Suman and his wife Sitima have two children. They have been Bay Area residents for the past 17 years.