Andrea Ribick
Health Level Seven
+1-734-677 7777
andrea@hl7.org 

RADM Theresa Cullen, Assistant Surgeon General and CIO, Indian Health Service, 
to be Featured Speaker at Conference: SOA in Healthcare: Value in a Time of Change
Conference hosted by OMG, HL7, OHT and SOA Consortium
will be held June 2-4, 2009 in Chicago, IL, USA

Needham, MA, USA and Ann Arbor, MI, USA - May 7, 2009 - OMG™, Health Level Seven® (HL7), Open Health Tools and the SOA Consortium™ today announced that Theresa Cullen, M.D., M.S., RADM, U.S. Public Health Service, Chief Information Officer, Indian Health Service (IHS), will be a featured speaker at the "SOA in Healthcare: Value in a Time of Change," conference. The conference will be held June 2-4, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago, IL. Registration details may be found online at http://www.omg.org/soa-healthcare.

At the SOA in Healthcare conference, Dr. Cullen will be presenting "Making the SOA Business Case to Support Clinical Care and Public Health."

"The Indian Health Service, like many organizations, has a longer list of things we would like to do than our IT budget can support. We are interested in SOA as a way to better align existing systems with changing business needs and planned investments," said Dr. Cullen. "This event is important to us because of the community that is coming together to pursue common interests. While our story is about planning a SOA investment, I believe that IHS and in fact the entire community will really benefit from the interactions with others who are thinking about and solving problems we all face."

About the Speaker
Theresa Ann Cullen, M.D., M.S., is the Assistant Surgeon General, Chief Information Officer (CIO), and Director of the Office of Information Technology for the Indian Health Service (IHS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. As CIO, Dr. Cullen oversees a diverse range of agency functions in information systems planning, development, and management. Dr. Cullen is a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and holds the rank of Rear Admiral.

Dr. Cullen began her IHS career in 1984 as a General Medical Officer. She served as the Tucson Program Area Maternal Child Health Coordinator and Area HIV Coordinator and as a General Medical Officer and Clinical Director where she managed clinical performance improvement activities. Dr. Cullen has also served as an IHS Senior Medical Informatics Consultant, RPMS Program Manager, Physician/Clinical Advisor, and the IHS lead on interagency agreements.

Among Dr. Cullen's numerous honors are the Meritorious Service Medal; Outstanding Service Medal; Achievement Medal; Commendation Medal; Unit Citation Medal; the IHS Director's Award, and was Program Manager when RPMS received the Davies Award for Public Health from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

The Indian Health Service mission is to work in partnership with American Indians and Alaska Native people to raise their physical, mental, social, and spiritual health to the highest level, ensuring that they have comprehensive, culturally acceptable personal and public health services. IHS operates 31 hospitals, 59 health centers, and 30 health stations, and employs a staff of over 15,000 and a clinical staff of over 4800.

Conference Overview
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption is viewed as a key enabler for the 21st century enterprise due to increased opportunity for productivity and integration, and requires significant changes for both business and IT executives. The focus of the SOA in Healthcare conference is to convey real-world experiences, assembling a community of peers to exchange ideas and discuss what has worked, what did not work, and review best practices for attendees to benefit from lessons learned faced in real implementations. Not a "tech industry" event, this conference is exclusively healthcare focused, and will highlight the challenges unique to healthcare organizations and emphasize cross-industry solutions that are viable within the healthcare domain. It is targeted primarily to a health-IT savvy audience. Everyone with an interest in SOA in healthcare is invited to attend.

Registration & Information
This workshop is sponsored by Annual Sponsors No Magic, SPARX Systems, Intel and Model Driven Solutions as well as Event Sponsors Gold Sponsor EDS, an HP company; and Silver Sponsor Appian. The early-bird registration discount is available until May 11, 2009. The registration cut-off for the Hyatt Regency O'Hare is May 11, 2009. Hotel and registration information is available at http://www.omg.org/soa-healthcare. Exhibit space is available; for more information contact Mike Narducci at marketing@omg.org +1-781-444 0404. Sponsorship opportunities are available; contact Ken Berk at ken.berk@omg.org or +1-781-444 0404.

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About Health Level Seven (HL7)
Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven, Inc. (www.HL7.org) is a global not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards development organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. HL7’s more than 2,300 members represent approximately 500 corporate members, which include more than 90 percent of the information systems vendors serving healthcare. HL7 affiliates have also been established in more than 30 countries around the world.

About The SOA Consortium
The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, NEC Sphere, SPARX Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by OMG.

For more information, please visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/ or email info@soa-consortium.org. 

Note to editors: SOA Consortium, OMG and Object Management Group are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About Open Health Tools
Open Health Tools is an open source community with a vision of enabling a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT professions can collaborate to build interoperable systems that enable patients and their care providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed. Open Health Tools will generate a vibrant active ecosystem involving software product and service companies, medical equipment companies, health care providers, insurance companies, government health service agencies, and standards organizations. For more information please visit www.openhealthtools.org.

About OMG
OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry consortium that in 2009 is celebrating its 20th Anniversary. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies, including: Real-time, Embedded and Specialized Systems, Analysis & Design, Architecture-Driven Modernization and Middleware and an even wider range of industries, including: Business Modeling and Integration, C4I, Finance, Government, Green Computing, Healthcare, Insurance, Legal Compliance, Life Sciences Research, Manufacturing Technology, Robotics, Software-Based Communications and Space.

OMG’s modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG’s middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries.

More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org.  OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA.

Note to editors: MDA, Model Driven Architecture, OMG Logo, XMI, UML, UML logo and CORBA are registered trademarks, and OMG, Object Management Group, MOF, MDA Logos, BPMN and Unified Modeling Language are trademarks of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Edited by Stephanie