A Madigan civilian informatics officer was recently named the 2014 U.S. Army Medical Department Mercury Awards for Information Management/Information Technology Civilian of the Year.
Richard Barnhill, Madigan's Department of Clinical Informatics deputy chief, took home the individual award two years after the Madigan Informatics team won the unit award.
The retired Army medic said he is honored to accept the award and was genuinely surprised when his name was called.
"The award I got this year was for a number of things that we're doing around support of Patient Center Medical Home, chronic pain care, third party collections, network referrals and then some workaround amputee care and an amputee registry that we built here to track all amputees around the Department of Defense," he said.
Barnhill said he's thankful for the individual Mercury Award, but that it makes him feel a sense of validation for the work he and his team do on a daily basis across a whole gambit of taskings.
"I'm actually blessed with the best team in the medical command," he said. "They make me look smart every day. I'm really proud of them. It was really great two years ago when we got the team award because I really think that validated the great group of individuals that we have here. I'm lucky and blessed to be the leader of those folks, but really, it's a group effort in everything that we do and it's a lot of blood, sweat and tears as we take on each project to make it come to fruition."
Col. Eric Shry, Madigan Department of Clinical Informatics Chief and Program Director, pointed out the fact that Barnhill, a GS-12 has been successfully taking on and tackling tasks at a GS-14 level resulting in positively impacting Medical Command and the Defense Health Agency.
"His ability to bring new things into our environment (which isn't always very accepting to new things) is remarkable," said Shry. "He is a leader in inter-operability, working with data exchange with the VA and civilian partners. He also has been important in working on the next electronic health record, and the next (virtual) desktop."
Barnhill said running the chronic pain tool was one of the tasks that really stood out to him in 2014. He obtained more than $2 million in outside grant funding to create pain management tools that were then adopted as the DoD Standard. His team took a product built by a university and sponsored by the National Institute of Health and made it useful for both patients and providers. The original product was disjointed with two separate functionalities.
"We were able to combine all that so they could interact together around the measurement of their pain treatment and how well they're doing with their pain treatment," said Barnhill. "We were able to significantly see a betterment of the care plans and then also some standardization around how to provide pain care. So, I'm not seeing patients myself, but we're providing help to make it easier for these people who do."
Having come up through the ranks in Army Medicine, Barnhill is uniquely aware of what people seeing patients need and what might just become an arduous task. He said that connection has been invaluable in designing Madigan informatics.
"When you walk into a clinic, or anywhere else, you kind of appreciate the rucksack that they're carrying right now," said Barnhill. "So, you can see right away that this will be a benefit to them or this will actually make it more difficult for them depending on what you're trying to do."
Barnhill, who provides continuity for Informatics as military members rotate in and out, said he remains just as excited about his job as he did the day he started.
"This is my profession -- I love it," he said. "I really like doing informatics. I really think it's important. I never have a boring day. There's always something going on. When I leave here, I think about 10 other things I wanted to get done for the day and I'll have them racked and stacked for tomorrow and I really love Madigan. Madigan has been a real home to me. It feels like a little community all unto itself."
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