Dear colleagues,
Please join me in congratulating the new members of the BOD and introducing the entire BOD. We would like to thank them for their willingness to serve our organization.
The new board members started their 2-year term on January 1st, 2025. They will work closely with the current BODs to ensure a smooth transition.
President-Elect: Gwen Holder, MSN, RN, NI-BC
I have been an ANIA member since 2005. I am committed to this chapter as I was a founding member of the chapter in 2015, served as president from 2015-2018 then served on the Board of directors till 2020. In 2018, the chapter sponsored an all-day conference that was attended by approximately 100 attendees and received wonderful reviews and left the chapter in a financially stable position.
My career is winding down and I plan to retire in the next few years and would like to give back to a field that I have so rewarding. Nursing Informatics is a growing specialty and with the boom in Artificial Intelligence and threat of Cyber-attack, we as a group need to network, to share our knowledge and expertise to prepare for the future. A strong state chapter, one, that touches all regions of Tennessee is needed. I would like to help build that. I’d hope to inspire others to get involved in ANIA chapter board positions. I love to mentor and develop others, so the chapter has future leaders.
I have been working in nursing informatics since 1994 and serving as director of Nursing Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center since 2015. I’m adjunct faculty at Vanderbilt School of Nursing and have served as preceptor to countless graduate Nursing Informatics students. Since 2012, I have been co-teaching the Nursing Informatics Bootcamp with Susan Newbold and this allows me to interact with those interested in learning about informatics and sitting for the ANCC certification. I became certified in 2010. Other professional endeavors include serving as a reviewer for Applied Clinical Informatics, an official journal of the International Medical Informatics Association and the American Medical Informatics Association, as well as presenting Regionally and Nationally on Informatics related topics. One of the proudest moments of my career was receiving the 2018 Adrienne Ames Transformational Leadership Award for my work on leading nursing as we transitioned to a single vendor system.
Communications Chair: Brea Bowers, MSN, RN
Brea Bowers is an IT Lead Clinical Education Specialist at Regional One Health Hospital in Memphis, TN. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Natural Science at Christian Brothers University. Discovering her passion in Nursing, she completed her BSN and MSN at the Loewenberg School of Nursing, University of Memphis.
Brea’s nursing career includes ten years of Nursing experience in patient-centered care, leadership, research, and IT. She has served in various roles in the pediatric and adult patient population. Brea continues to educate staff members in her current role as an IT Lead Clinical Education Specialist. She teaches the incoming Nursing, Ancillary staff members, and Ambulatory staff members the Cerner and Revenue Cycle charting system at Regional One Health.
She has received various honors including: Top 40 Under 40 Urban Elite Professionals Awardee 2023, 50 Leaders Loewenberg College of Nursing- University of Memphis, New Memphis Embark Leadership Program Graduate, and Featured SoundCheck Member Spotlight- Greater Memphis Chamber.
She is an active and proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She is also a member of National Association of Health Services Executives (N.A.H.S.E), Junior League of Memphis, National Black MBA Association, TN Chapter of the American Nursing Informatics Association, and the Young Professionals Affinity Group at Regional One Health. She also serves as a Youth Advisor at her church, True Fellowship Ministries.
Education Chair: Faiza Harris Dang, BSN, RN, NI-BC, CAHIMS
Faiza Harris Dang is an experienced registered nurse with integrity, compassion, and perseverance. Adept with technology, detail-oriented, proficient at building and maintaining professional relationships, and able to grasp new concepts quickly. Before transitioning to her role in Healthcare IT, she gained experience as a registered nurse working in neurosurgery, ortho surgery, and Neonatal ICU.
She demonstrates her passion as a nursing leader through service as an elected Tennessee Nurses Association Board of Director for District 1 and professional achievements as the IT Lead Clinical Informaticist at Regional One Health.
Faiza obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry degree from Middle Tennessee State University and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree from Union University. Currently, she is pursing a Master of Science in Nursing Informatics degree from Western Governors University. To demonstrate her proficiency and expertise, she obtained the Nursing Informatics Board Certification (NI-BC), the Certified Associate in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CAHIMS) certification, and is an American Heart Association BLS Instructor. She has a passion for always learning something new and helping others.
Treasurer: Ashley Trambley, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, NI-BC
My name is Ashley Trambley! I live in Kingston Springs, TN just outside of Nashville. I am the wife of Alex, and mom to a wonderful first grader named Aston. We have an adopted tabby named Kit Kat (named after my son’s favorite candy) who loves to make appearances on Teams calls. I love to read and bake, and I am a novice gardener as of this past year.
I have been a nurse for 14 years with 10 of those years being in leadership positions. I received my master’s in nursing informatics from Vanderbilt University in 2018. After graduation, I served as the Manager of Vanderbilt Nursing Informatics Services until I moved into my current role in 2021 as the Director of the Discharge Care Center at VUMC. In this role, my team supports patients for 30 days after they leave Vanderbilt University Hospital. We deliver interdisciplinary care in an innovative way leveraging a telephony system, an SMS communication platform with bidirectional texting, and our Epic EMR. In my role, I am responsible for the strategic operational direction of our department as well as developing our technology growth and optimization plans. I am ANCC certified in Nursing Informatics and as a Nurse Executive, Advanced, and I am certified by Epic as a Clinical Informaticist. I enjoy designing thoughtful technology workflows that allow for care to be captured in a meaningful way that reduces burden on those providing the care while also having a data capturing framework to capture the value of the care they provide. I also enjoy the business aspects of my role and finding creative ways to achieve goals while also being cost effective.
Secretary: Shawn Coomer, MBA, MSN, RN, NI-BC
Shawn Coomer, MBA, MSN, RN, NI-BC is the Manager of Nursing Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Her team supports nurses at 7 hospitals and over 290 clinics. She received her MBA (2022) and BSN (2010) from Lipscomb University and her MSN (2014) from Austin Peay State University. She currently holds Epic certifications in Cogito Reporting and Epic Clinical Informatics and is board certified in Nursing Informatics. Previously, she worked as a Credentialed and Principal Trainer for the VUMC eStar Training and Delivery Team. Her eight years of clinical experience were primarily in inpatient orthopedics and urology, but she also worked as a travel nurse for two years where she had the opportunity to experience a wide range of nursing specialties. Shawn and her team have worked on numerous projects that contribute to documentation burden reduction for nurses and device integration. As a lifelong learner, she is passionate about sharing her work and learning from other organizations around the world. Her favorite saying is, “Be afraid, then do it anyway.”