Our CHIMA chapters are pleased to announce new chapter committee chairs for the NSPE and SK chapter committees. The ON chapter committee would also like to highlight a well-received speaker from their education day this past fall. 

We are pleased to welcome Loretta Trealout as the new NSPE chapter committee chair. Loretta brings over 10 years of experience in the health care industry, including in coding positions and coordinating a Meditech upgrade for her facility.

We’d also like to welcome Michael McGill as the new SK chapter committee chair. Michael is a privacy and access officer with the Saskatchewan Health Authority and is looking forward to using his leadership skills and passion for HIM in his role as chair.

Our chapters have been busy planning for the upcoming year and reflecting on their 2019 events. In November, the ON chapter committee held an in-person education day in Toronto that over 240 people attended. One particularly well-received session was “Privacy: Cyber Security,” presented by Imran Ahmad, a data and privacy breach lawyer and partner at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP (Blakes). He shared his knowledge of an emerging threat of cyber incidents in health care and how to develop pre-cyber incident preparation best practices.

As technology has developed, so have cyber attacks and data breaches within health care and other industries worldwide. With paper charts, CHIMA members and their respective areas of work would need to monitor physical access to the chart storage area—but with emerging electronic health records, the threats of attacks can be located outside those physical walls.

Taking a holistic approach to cyber preparedness with tools—from the road map of identifying, analyzing, and evaluating threats to treating risks—with frequent monitoring can help organizations develop best practices for preventing cyber attacks. Imran’s expertise gave all who attended insight into the tools to build these best practices and the multiple prongs of cyber preparedness.