Tonya Hongsermeier

Tonya leads Elimu’s product innovation and implementation strategies. She has held prior senior leadership roles in informatics at Beth Israel Lahey Health, Partners Healthcare, Cerner, and InterQual. She studied medicine at Boston University and trained in Internal Medicine at the New England Deaconess Hospital. In the course of medical practice, she realized the challenges presented by the “managed care” movement to patient care, ultimately finding her way into technology as a backbone for a learning, patient-centered, digital healthcare system. While at Lahey, as CMIO, she supported the deployment of an integrated EHR platform across 6 hospitals, over 2000 physicians, and 300 outpatient clinics ultimately achieving system-wide HIMSS EMRAM Stage 7. While at Partners, she led the development of a renowned Clinical Decision Support and Knowledge Management team within the Clinical Informatics Research and Development Group and implemented a variety of leading-edge tools and governance structures to improve the embedding of clinical knowledge in electronic health records. Her team implemented a collaboration and content management platform before social media made this approach popular. She also served as a Team Lead on the government-funded Clinical Decision Support Consortium, Advancing Clinical Decision Support research project, and Health eDecisions Initiative. She also served as the inaugural co-chair for the Semantic Web Healthcare-Life Sciences Special Interest Group for the World Wide Web Consortium under Tim Berners-Lee. Her focus remains on ensuring that our caregivers and patients have access to the best solutions possible for achieving a healing connection and wellness.