Chapter Leadership 2024-2025

Letter from the President Dipty Desai

Dear HIMSS NorCal Members, Sponsors, Collaborators, and Volunteers,

Thank you ALL for your confidence and trust in electing me as your President for HIMSS NorCal for the Calendar Year 2024-2025. I am humbled and honored by your support.

It has been an honor and privilege to have worked with HIMSS Norcal and the past three presidents to champion key initiatives initially as a volunteer and subsequently as a board member. I had the pleasure of contributing to a number of committees and was also instrumental in leading, organizing, planning, and hosting a number of in-person events:

As the incoming President of the HIMSS Northern California Chapter, my primary goal is to

Foster a vibrant community of healthcare professionals dedicated to leveraging technology to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiencies.
Enhance our member engagement through dynamic educational programs, networking opportunities, and collaborative initiatives that drive innovation and best practices in health information management.
Forge strong partnerships with local healthcare institutions, technology companies, and academic organizations, I would like to create a robust ecosystem that supports continuous learning and professional development.
Ensure all stakeholder voices (providers, payers, pharma, med devices, students, vendors, enterprises, academicians) are heard and valued.
Establish HIMSS Norcal as a beacon of innovation and excellence in the healthcare technology landscape.

Through these efforts, I aspire to position the HIMSS Northern California Chapter as a leader in healthcare transformation showcasing its constituents (all of you) and their accomplishments in Northern California.

I would like to introduce the Board whose mission is aligned with the vision I have articulated:

Executive Committee: President (Dipty Desai), President-Elect (Marc Mar Yohana), Past-President (Viveka Rydel-Anderson), Secretary (Jeff Hawley), Treasurer (Emily Ly)

Committee Chairs: Programs (Reena Bhargava), Education (Yuliya Behey), Advocacy (Amith Vishvanathan), Membership (Carlene Lugtu), Marketing (Vrushali Malpekar), Sponsorship (Suman Mishra)

It takes a village to make this happen, and I would like to thank all the Vice Chairs, Committee Volunteers, Event Attendees, Organizations, and Sponsors for their valuable contributions to our success!

With a collective, collaborative force working together, HIMSS NorCal can strive for the GOLD!

Warm Regards,

Dipty Desai, PhD.

President HIMSS NorCal

Executive Committee

President

Dipty Desai, PhD

norcal.president@himsschapter.org

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.

President-Elect

Marc Mar-Yohana

Past-President

Viveka Rydell-Anderson, JD, MSc

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.

Secretary

Jeff Hawley

norcal.info@himsschapter.org

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.

Treasurer

Emily Ly

norcal.treasurer@himsschapter.org

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.

Committee Chairs

Advocacy Committee Chair

Amith Vishwanathan

norcal.advocacy@himsschapter.org

Membership

Carlene Lugtu

Programs

Reena Bhargava

norcal.events@himsschapter.org

Sponsorship

Suman Mishra

norcal.sponsorship@himsschapter.org

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.