If your doctor is one of the many in Rhode Island tied into the electronic-records system, odds are good that Jennie Chiller Gordon is partly responsible for that.
At 31 years old, Gordon, director of the regional extension center for the Rhode Island Quality Institute, has been a key player in the ongoing education and outreach effort intended to help local physicians go digital, including use of electronic health records. She has been with the institute since June 2008.
She wrote and distributed a guidebook, “Take Your Practice Digital: EHR adoption,” to educate health care providers and promote adoption of health-information technology in Rhode Island.
Recognizing the need to put this information and more online, she created a social networking education website for Rhode Island providers, www.DocEHRtalk.org, that includes resources, incentive information, news and case studies of local physicians.
With the foundation of an EHR adoption program in place and with support from the state’s health care community, the institute won a $6.5 million federal grant, Gordon noted, to continue its outreach efforts.
These efforts also include a statewide Health IT Expo, sponsored by the institute. Gordon also led a statewide collaborative team of physicians to drive the strategy for increasing use of EHRs, increasing the diversity and membership of the Health IT Physicians Advisory Committee. “In the last three years that I have been in this role, the EHR adoption rate has gone from 67 percent to 81 percent,” Gordon wrote in her 40 Under Forty application.
She holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration. •
