Two new co-chairs— Patricia Lavely, senior vice president and CIO at Gwinnett Medical Center, and Dave Lehr, vice president and CIO at Anne Arundel Medical Center—have been tapped to help lead the CHIME Opioid Task Force in 2019.
According to the Michigan-based College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the new additions mark “the task force’s transition from its launch phase to long-term sustainability.”
CHIME announced the Opioid Task Force at the association’s CIO Fall Forum in 2017. The motivation behind the idea came after the unfortunate passing of Timothy Kopetsky, the son of Ed Kopetsky, who is the CIO of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and Stanford Children’s Health. Tim Kopetsky died from an accidental opioid overdose.
Lavely and Lehr join Ed Kopetsky as the task force’s current chairs. Jim Turnbull, CIO at University of Utah Health Care, stepped down as founding co-chair earlier this month. “Ed and Jim have done an amazing job in just one year,” Russell Branzell, president and CEO of CHIME, said in a statement. “Their vision and leadership helped us build the task force from the ground up into a resource that is now used around the world. There are people alive today because of this task force, and because of the commitment of Ed, Jim, Patty, Dave and all of the other task force members.”
To date, CHIME has hosted six educational webinars, submitted 12 opioid-related letters and statements to federal policy makers and worked closely with congressional and federal agency staff to help shape opioid policies, according to the association’s officials.
The task force also posted the first three chapters of the Opioid Task Force Playbook, a guide that provides a framework to build IT-based supports for launching and maintaining systemwide initiatives to reduce unnecessary opiate prescriptions that can lead to addiction, according to CHIME officials, who add that members are working on the final chapters now.
