President
Bonnie Norris, MS, RN-BC, CPHIMS
Rochester, MN
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Bonnie has loved every job in nursing she has ever had! Bonnie has worked in medical, cardiac, and intensive care areas, in addition to chronic condition management. When she took a role in quality, she discovered that nursing informatics was a fabulous alignment with quality and obtained a post-masters nursing informatics certification. She treasures her certification as a certified informatics nurse from ANCC. She also holds a Certified Professional in Health Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS) credential.
Bonnie currently works as a Quality Senior Informatics Analyst at Mayo Clinic and supports the advanced data needs for the Quality Systems & Submissions department.
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President-Elect
Mary Slusser, MS, RN
Davenport, IA
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Mary has been a nurse since 2015 and has been in the Genesis Health System since 2007. Her background is in medical surgical nursing and clinical informatics. She has been in her current nursing informaticist role since 2017 and supports a variety of departments including nursing, quality, care coordination, and regulatory. She has experiences supporting technological devices, project management, and nursing education.
Her education started at Eastern Iowa Community college with an associates followed by a bachelor's degree in nursing from St. Ambrose University. She completed her Master's of Healthcare Informatics degree with Southern Illinois University and will complete a dual Doctorate in Nursing and Master's of Business Administration in May of 2022. Her aspirations after completing school is to move into a leadership role while continuing to implement innovation and technology into nursing workflow.
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Immediate Past President
Janis Watts, DNP, RN, NE-BC
Key West, Florida
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Janis currently reside in Florida where she works as faculty at the Galen College of Nursing in Tampa. She was with Indiana University Health for 27 years in a variety of operational and informatics roles before relocating to Florida. Janis was responsible for project governance, project management, clinical project implementation, clinical system education, and a clinical helpdesk at IU Health. Additionally, Janis was involved in many other nursing related clinical implementation projects. Janis completed her DNP in Healthcare Leadership with Chamberlain University. She is also certified as a nurse executive.
Janis’s favorite jobs were as a clinical information systems liaison, where she initiated informatics program at a new facility. She and her team brought up 82 applications on the same day! Another favorite was serving as the Magnet Program Director for that same facility 10 years later. Both were wonderful experiences.
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Treasurer
Anna Lorenzetto MS-CIPCT, BSN, RN
Indianapolis IN
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Anna is currently the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Community Health Network in Indianapolis reporting to the Chief Analytics Officer and dyad to the System Chief Nurse Executive. In her current role, she supports all non-provider clinicians including nursing, therapies, dieticians, case management and unlicensed clinical staff at the network level for both acute and ambulatory spaces.
Before joining Community Health Network, Anna worked for 8 years for Ace Hardware where she was the Director of Administration and Finance for a chain of retail stores managing employee benefits, training, inventory control, purchasing and budgets.
Anna earned a Master of Science-Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies from the University of Washington-Seattle, a Bachelor of Science-Nursing and a Bachelor of Arts-Telecommunications and Italian from Indiana University. She is also ITIL and Epic certified and a trained Change Agent.
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Secretary
CJ Wachs, MSN, RN-BC
South Bend, Indiana
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CJ started in nursing informatics in 2002 and has worked in a variety of roles, including education, laboratory information systems analyst, nursing documentation informatics and director of informatics. She completed her Baccalaureate in Nursing through Indiana University – South Bend, Masters in Nursing Leadership and Management from The George Washington University in D.C. and holds certifications in nursing informatics, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, Epic Order and Documentation, and Cerner Core and PowerChart systems.
CJ is presently completing her DNP through Northern Kentucky University with the plan to move into an executive nursing informatics role upon completion. She is excited to be a part of the ANIA Midwest Chapter and hopes to help contribute to the continued development of informatics practice as well as improving the connections between nursing informatics peers.
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Webmaster
Mary Brown, MSN, RN-BC
Indianapolis IN
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Mary has been a nurse since 1997 and recently celebrated 23 years with IU Health. Her background includes medical surgical and critical care nursing, virtual ICU, and clinical informatics. Currently, Mary serves as the Clinical Informatics Manager for the IU Health Adult Academic Health Center team, comprised of Methodist and University hospitals.
Highlights from Mary's career include working on a universal bed unit, where she started as a medical surgical nurse and grew to critical care and permanent charge nurse. In 2005, she worked on a team to open our virtual ICU (ePartners) which served from 2005-2013 to provide RN and intensivist monitoring and support for critical care and progressive care patients in 5 IU Health facilities. It was in ePartners that she found love for workflows and data, as her organization transitioned with Cerner to develop their virtual ICU platform and implement the APACHE acuity system. She joined clinical informatics in 2014, serving as a clinical informatics coordinator supporting inpatient nursing units, implementation of new Cerner functionality, and governance for EMR requests and enhancements. During the COVID-19 pandemic she has served many different roles, including virtual COVID-19 screening, COVID-19 infusion clinic set-up, and surge planning.
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Member at Large
Mari Akre, PhD, NEA-BC, CPHIMS
Minneapolis, MN
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Mari has served in several senior leader practice and operations roles. Currently, she is the Sr. Population Health Strategy Executive consultation for care delivery and practice redesign and innovation, a new division within Cerner Corporation. She brings deep bench strength across clinical and operational nursing and informatics. Mari seeks to adeptly weave together LEAN process improvement methods, data analytics, evidence-based practice content and clinical workflows with smart health information technologies, to support cross functional teams to produce results that improve operation and clinician efficiency, enhance clinical quality and nurse-sensitive outcomes, and strengthen patient safety.
Among her strategic operations accomplishments, she has led redesign efforts for clinical delivery of care management and utilization management in two health systems, and implementation of nursing clinical informatics teams in several integrated health systems. She has been integral in the practice transformation that arises from implementing health information technologies, clinical decision support solutions and revenue cycle information solutions, placing clinicians and patients at the center of the knowledge-based design solutions.
Mari is Board certified through the American College of Nursing as a Nursing Executive-Advanced, NEA-BC and HIMSS International as a Certified Professional Health Information and Management Services, CPHIMS. She received her nursing baccalaureate from Viterbo University, Masters in Child and Family Development, University of WI-Madison, Masters in Nursing, Pediatrics and Research emphasis, University of WI-Madison, Doctorate in Child and Family Development, Dept of Human Ecology, University of WI-Madison, Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Nursing Informatics, University of WI-Milwaukee, College of Nursing. Mari is active with the Nursing Big Data Consortium, University of MN, College of Nursing, serving on the Knowledge Information Modeling and Nursing Care Coordination working groups. "Joining ANIA Midwest Chapter as a member, I hope to bring greater visibility to the important integrator role of nursing informatics as a vital resource on the clinical practice and operations teams powering innovative change and care improvements."
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Ernie is a nurse informaticist with over 15 years experience in clinical informatics. He has been involved in Health Information systems implementation, project management, team work building and collaboration. He specializes in SaaS (software as a service), consulting in product design, analysis and delivery. He graduated with high honors at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.
He is currently a Performance Improvement Coordinator for Quality Improvement. He was involved in developing programs related to Inpatient Core Measures, Value Based Purchasing, Advance Practice Nurses, Nurse Resident programs and Nursing Quality Indicators for Magnet. He was part of the Center for Advancing Practice Provider Practices (CAP2) team that was a recipient of Innovation Award at Chicago Health Executives Forum (CHEF) in 2014.
Ernie has one goal in mind, utilizing data and systems to improving quality of care and saving patient lives as the end result.
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Brittany Brumback, RN brings 12+ years of experience in the health care industry. Brittany is currently a IT Clinical Informaticist Analyst at UnityPoint Health in the Des Moines metropolitan area. Prior to working in Information Technology, Brittany worked as a Pediatric Oncology Nurse at Blank Children's Hospital in Des Moines, IA. She also brings clinical experience in the Home Care, Intensive Care, Transitional Care, and Nursing Home spaces. While at her last position, she found a passion for the ever-changing electronic medical record and improving our charting system. She began using the A3 model and Lean Principle to improve her unit's needs, and she has carried that through to her current role today. In her tenure on the informatics team, she has helped implement two new Epic modules (Phoenix & Home Health/Hospice), various User Groups, and regional support.
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Member at Large
Bre Loughlin, MS, RN
Madison, WI
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Bre brings 22 years of expertise in healthcare, focusing on simplifying the complex and creating a revolution in transforming technology to elevate nursing practice. As a nurse executive at Epic, she launched 5 products over 8 years with a focus on nursing innovation, mobile solutions, and behavioral health.
Her final project at Epic was in collaboration with the Executive Director of the Washington State Healthcare Authority in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Underserved populations needed telehealth immediately. The approach was like nothing Epic had done in the past - faster, lighter, focused.
In March 2020 she met the Executive Director for Porchlight. There was another problem that could be solved through nursing and technology. With 2 donated laptops and a Mi-Fi at the Madison Porchlight shelter she was able to connect nurse volunteers to conduct COVID-19 screening.
Starting the company Nurse Disrupted, LLC with her partner Tracy Zvenyach was a natural next step for Bre. The Virtual Volunteer program continues to extend COVID-19 screening to shelters across Wisconsin. It also provides practicum experience for nurses finishing post-graduate degrees. Mixing compassion, technology, creativity, nursing, and vision in order to focus on light, fast, solution-based technologies addressing healthcare needs.
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Member at Large
Connie O'Rourke MSN, RN-BC
Rockford, IL
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Connie is a Registered Nurse with 34 years of experience in health care. She has an 11 years of bedside nursing experience ranging from adult medical to women and infant service lines. She began my career in clinical informatics in 1997 where she held roles as clinical application analyst, trainer, and project manager and been involved in several hospital and ambulatory clinical information system implementations. She has held volunteer Board positions at HIMSS Greater Illinois Chapter for 2 years serving as Education Member-at-Large and Education Director. Currently she holds a position as Clinical Informatics Nurse at SwedishAmerican a Division of UW Health in Rockford, Illinois.
Connie's education began with a bachelor’s degree in Biology (BS) from Western Illinois University followed by a bachelor’s degree in Nursing (BSN) from St. Louis University, School of Nursing. I completed my Master’s degree in Nursing Informatics (MSN) from the University of Iowa, School of Nursing in May, 2012. Currently, she is board certified in Nursing Informatics from the American Nursing Credentialing Center (ANCC) since August, 2014.
Connie's informatics skills include application build and design involving various healthcare technology software such as Epic, Cerner, McKesson, and Nextgen. Connie is Epic Certified in ClinDoc, Orders, Clinical Informatics, and Clarity Data Module. She has several years’ experience managing both small and large scale IT projects through the entire project management life cycle. She also has experience evaluating and translating information technology solutions to meet complex clinical workflow processes and have created and developed meaningful reports for the analysis of healthcare outcomes.
Connie states "I look forward to contributing to ANIA Midwest Chapter’s goals and objectives in the upcoming year."
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Member at Large
Holly Pretzman MSN, RN, CPHIMS
Cadott, WI
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Holly received her BSN at Viterbo University, LaCrosse WI in 2007. She has worked in patient care in a cardiac/medical/surgical unit and as an ambulatory nurse in nephrology. From 2011 to present, Holly ventured to work in quality informatics and learned her true passion was for data, analysis, and analytics. She then worked towards her MSN in nursing informatics at Walden University, Minneapolis MN.
Holly currently works as a Senior Informatics Analyst at Mayo Clinic where she supports Mayo Clinic's international sites in quality measurement and reporting, survey and quality data submissions, another other reporting and analytics projects for the Enterprise Advanced Analysis Department. |
Member at Large
Wendy Wittwer, MS, RN
Madison WI
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Wendy is an experienced and passionate Nursing Informatics Specialist at UW Health in Madison, WI. In 2000, after 13 years as a medical/surgical nurse, Wendy realized the role technology started playing in health care and ventured into nursing informatics when she became project manager for the first medication barcode scanning system in the nation. Since then, she has held various NI roles and grown her innovative spirit and change management expertise by leading several successful system-wide projects, committees, and improvement initiatives.
Wendy is excited to be on the ANIA - Midwest Region board where her focus will be to identify opportunities to promote the specialty of Nursing Informatics while continuing to grow her own nursing informatics and leadership skill set, knowledge base, and professional network by serving a nursing community she feels strongly connected to.
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