Gila Pyke

Gila Pyke

Gila Pyke

Lead Consultant/President, Cognaissance
Involved with IHE for 10 years

I have been cheerfully involved in IHE ITI since being “voluntold” into leading the development of the Digital Signatures supplement in 2004. Since then, I have had the opportunity to work with some of the best brains in the industry supporting the development of various privacy and security, and document sharing profiles and whitepapers and am cheerfully taking my turn as co-chair starting in 2013.

I’ve also been lucky enough to be involved in deployments of IHE profiles in Canada, the US, France and Saudi Arabia, and am thrilled to see all of our hard work making a difference to patients across the world.

When working in risk management and adverse event reporting, we often found that information errors were a key factor in preventable adverse events. Health IT is an exceptional way to reduce such unfortunate incidents, but it must be developed and deployed in an implementable manner in order to succeed in reducing harm.

Organizations like HL7, DICOM, and numerous others have developed extensive standards to help establish information interoperability, but they lack a critical piece to facilitate the deployment of these standards in order to address key use cases. IHE’s use case focus is what continues to inspire me with the way it simplifies the deployment process for large and small healthcare providers alike.

The thing I love most about IHE is how open and easy it is to participate. Anyone and everyone is welcome to jump in, propose use cases for us to solve, attend meetings in person or by phone, provide comments or submit change proposals or strengthen our work in any way. All contributions are valued and encouraged, and that kind of environment leads to incredible results.