Dr. Maureen Lucy Schafer received her Ph.D in Health Care Systems and Informatics from the University of Arizona.  An enterprise level clinical informaticist, Family Nurse Practitioner and military veteran, Dr. Schafer possesses a comprehensive background in advanced clinical care, health care systems, teaching and expert application of the Systems Life Cycle model.  This training and accountability is derived from 27 years of experience in the United States Army, consulting, teaching and informatics work within and across academia and multiple health care organizations around the world.  Presently, she is a full-time consultant for the Department of Defense, Defense Health Agency as an Informatics Subject Matter Expert with application to enterprise level projects and review and drafting of multiple healthcare policy documents for government leadership.  Dr. Schafer is passionate about sharing knowledge, and is an adjunct professor teaching across the curriculum in the Health Systems Administration Department at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Many healthcare systems that provide the interweaving framework of people, physical structures and electronic systems to support the application mandate of best practices seemingly changes from one organization to the next. Ultimately, it creates a lack of standardization, cumbersome processes, user frustration, and unreliable outcome metrics. The reliance in developing new systems is then based on thought leadership at that point in time rather than applying science to guide the system innovation or practice. The challenge is to move us collectively from thought leadership to project implementation framed and acted upon via evidenced based science. Inherent in this change is to specialize the blending the best of both industry and academia' s priority variables. Merging the domains of industry and academia as collaborative coauthors in new system development supports project management threaded with validated and evidence-based practices.