Nnaemeka (Emeka) Okafor, MD, MS, will join Memorial Hermann as the Director of Medical Informatics for Acute Care Services (hospital inpatient and emergency department care) as of October 1, 2014. In this role, Dr. Okafor will be directing all of the system efforts for medical informatics for our hospitals and emergency departments. He will be working closely with ISD team, your hospital Medical Informatics Committees and leading physicians, MHMD CPC’s, our system quality, pharmacy, nursing and other clinical departments, and be a key representative with ongoing development work with Cerner.
Dr. Okafor is board certified in Emergency Medicine and in Clinical Informatics, and has most recently served as the Medical Director of Informatics for Clinical Decision Support at the Harris County Hospital District (Harris Health). At Harris Health, Dr. Okafor was in charge of order set development and content management, facilitated the collaboration between medical, nursing and ancillary services for clinical decision support, and ensured compliance for the CMS “meaningful use” programs in these areas. Within emergency medicine specifically, he has completed applied informatics research and implemented improvements related to emergency physician information retrieval, decision making and departmental workflows.
Dr. Okafor attended the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine and then completed his emergency medicine residency at the Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts. He joined Memorial Hermann and UTHealth in 2007,and has served as an attending emergency physician at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center since that time. He obtained a Master’s degree from the UT School of Biomedical Informatics and completed a fellowship under the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) focusing on Patient Safety and Quality of health information technology. He also completed the Memorial Hermann- Texas Medical Center Clinical Safety and Effectiveness Program which trained clinical quality improvement leaders to integrate quality improvement and patient safety into the daily clinical practice,