Transforming Pediatric Care: Dana Schinasi's Health Informatics Leadership at Lurie Children's
Dana Aronson Schinasi, MD, MHI, saw the potential of telemedicine well before the onset of the COVID pandemic. Her passion for evolving pediatric care delivery models drew her to the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies (SPS) master's in Health Informatics program. Although the pandemic delayed her start in the program, the knowledge and skills she gained through her degree helped establish her as a leader and innovator in the digital health field.
Schinasi pursued a residency in Pediatrics followed by a fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine after graduating from medical school, and cultivated an interest in the communication aspect of care. "I have always loved the need to establish a rapport quickly [with patients], to get on the same page and to be able to communicate what's under the hood," she says.
When she began working as a Pediatric Emergency Medicine attending physician at what is now Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago in 2011, she observed that some pediatric patients were directed to the hospital when they didn't have to, an endeavor that cost the patients time, money, and particularly with pediatric patients, energy. "Maybe they didn't necessarily need to come to the hospital, and we could have handled that another way," she says.
By 2014, she recognized telemedicine's potential to better communicate with patients and among medical staff. She dug into the topic, working on a pilot program with Northwestern Kellogg School of Management students interested in whether telemedicine could serve pediatric patients already located in another facility instead of coming to the Lurie Children’s Emergency Department. The experience started her on a path to further lean into the potential for technology to help streamline care, improve clinician and patient experience, and most importantly impact outcomes. Five years later, she decided it was time to get another degree to help support this growing need.
Timely knowledge on a flexible online schedule
Schinasi first considered pursuing an MBA but met a colleague who told her about pursuing a master’s in Health Informatics. She learned about Northwestern SPS’s online program and applied. She was accepted in January 2020, shortly before the global pandemic took hold. Within a few months, her expertise with electronic health tools became highly sought after. “Those of us who knew anything about telemedicine, that's all we did," she says. She deferred her enrollment for a term while working on the front lines of the global health emergency and matriculated in June 2020.
If there was an upside to pursuing her degree while working in a hospital during the pandemic, she says that she got to live it in parallel with learning about it. “It was useful as a professional to have real-world experience and then delve into existing literature, understand the why, and then be able to build upon that," she says.
Schinasi couldn't work from home during the pandemic, so the program's flexible nature was key, as she tackled one course per quarter. "I was very grateful that all of the courses were asynchronous," she says (Once, when she was required to join a live class, she had to log in from the emergency department). She completed her coursework early in the morning before her children woke up or after they went to bed. She opted not to take the group work courses during times that she knew were heavy for her kids or at work. "I was always doing it on my own time," she says. "All the instructors understood that their students were professionals who worked full-time jobs."
Enhanced knowledge for leading health experts
Even for someone who had specialized in digital health well before it became mainstream, Schinasi says she gained a great deal of knowledge and perspective from courses like Health Analytics Leadership and American Healthcare System. "You put into context how things evolved and the different constraints of how we roll out programs." She says that when it comes to moving the needle on how care is delivered, "It's helpful to understand why it's evolved to be delivered in this way and why the American health system is so complex."
She also took advantage of the opportunity to take electives like User-centered System Design. "I learned a lot from the experiences of others with that expertise and how they apply those to parallel problems." Schinasi adds that Health Information Technology (HIT) Standards and Interoperability courses laid a foundation for her growth, which allowed her to become more involved at Lurie and advance her career.
While Schinasi specialized in Health Administration Informatics, she also learned from her classmates in the Clinical Informatics and Health Technology Informatics tracks. "People came with different experiences and different goals. We might approach the same week's topic with a different lens," she says. Her classmates shared their experiences and pulled in references to support their arguments that she says she wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. “I appreciated that the MHI program pulled together like-minded people working to solve the same real-world problems in healthcare but brought different expertise and different minds to it. That's applicable to how we work in real life."
Applications for frontline use in the health field
While in the master's in Health Informatics program, Schinasi's professional responsibilities at Lurie expanded from Telemedicine Director to Digital Health Medical Director. As her professional scope broadened, she was able to lean into coursework that gave her more exposure to aspects of digital health that corresponded to her role, including legal and ethical issues, both the business and the public health side, and additional background in consumer digital health.
Schinasi designed her capstone project to bring together all her learnings and experience into a cohesive plan to solve a real-world problem. She designed a digital tool to bridge the care gap for guardians and minors admitted and discharged from the hospital for asthma symptoms. The tool includes a symptom monitoring questionnaire for patients who need additional care but may not require a new emergency department visit.
“The goal was to design and implement a pathway to help support patients in that transition time from discharge to home. We worked with different stakeholders to pull this together," she says. The tool helps get education into patients’ hands earlier, delivers care more equitably, and reduces the stress of taking a child to the ER. "This has always been my favorite: the why," she says. "You can design something amazing from today till tomorrow, but you've got to have an anchor on why it matters so that people use it." As of November 2024, over 1300 patients have used the tool.
What's next for Health Informatics graduate Dana Schinasi
Schinasi was named Chief Medical Informatics Officer shortly after she received her master's in Health Informatics and now serves as Lurie's physician bridge between technology and clinical care. She uses the tools she picked up from her degree to tackle new and ongoing digital issues, such as a recent incident where Lurie faced an unanticipated prolonged technological downtime, a situation she was able to helm thanks to her experience in the program bringing people together to solve complex problems. "One of the cool things about health informatics is there may not be that many people who have done this yet, and you’re figuring out how to do it,” she says, while creating new knowledge in the process.
In a world where it’s easy to get so much done with and learn so much from a smart device, Schinasi says, “We need to be able to do that in healthcare. That's the thing that I'm really passionate about and that I think is fascinating when you add that added layer of complexity with Pediatrics.”
Northwestern University School of Professional Studies offers many degree and certificate programs, with evening and online options available. To learn more about how Northwestern University's online Master’s in Health Informatics prepares graduates to advance their careers in health informatics, fill out the form below, and we will be in touch with you soon.