Plenary Session: "Technology as a Tool to Enhance Medication Safety for Older Adults: Insights from Agile Science and Its Derivatives"

Malaz A. Boustani is a geriatrician, a neuroscientist, and an implementation scientist with extensive experience in developing, evaluating, implementing, and disseminating health care innovations with a focus on brain health. He is the Founding Director of the Sandra Eskenazi Center for Brain Care Innovation and the Director and Chief Innovation and Implementation Officer for Indiana University Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science (www.hii.iu.edu). Over the past decade, Dr. Boustani has built a clinical laboratory of more than 2,000 ambulatory practices serving at least 10 million lives within five Midwestern States (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky). He used the above clinical laboratory to lead the execution of numerous clinical research studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services totaling more than $100 million. He has more than 190 peer-reviewed publications.

Panel Session: "Transforming Patient Care Through Technology: Real-World Implementation"

Hasnaa Diraoui is a Nurse Informaticist at Houston Methodist with over five years of experience in this role, beginning her career at Houston Methodist as a new graduate nurse with a clinical background in MedSurg and Long Term Acute Care (LTACH). Her focus is on leveraging health information technology to improve patient safety, clinical workflows, and patient outcomes. She is Epic Certified and works closely with interdisciplinary teams to support safe, high-quality care for adult patients through effective clinical decision support and system design.

Workshop Session: "Hands-On Clinical Natural Language Processing for Detecting Adverse Drug Events in Older Adults with Heart Failure"

Sunyang Fu is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Team Science at the Center for Translational AI Excellence and Applications in Medicine at the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics. He is also affiliated with the UTHealth Institute on Aging, the Network for Investigation of Delirium: Unifying Scientists, and Mayo Clinic. The overarching goal of his research is to accelerate, improve and govern the secondary use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for clinical and translational research toward valid, high throughput, reproducible, and trustworthy discoveries. He has significant collaborative research experience in aging and geriatrics research.

Panel Session: "Transforming Patient Care Through Technology: Real-World Implementation"

Amaris Fuentes is a board-certified critical care pharmacist and Epic-certified clinical informaticist with over 14 years of experience in clinical pharmacy, medication safety, clinical decision support, and EHR optimization. She currently serves as Manager of Clinical Informatics at Houston Methodist, leading strategic informatics initiatives to enhance patient safety, regulatory compliance, and clinical efficiency across the system. Amaris holds a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Houston and completed her PGY1 Pharmacy Residency and PGY2 Critical Care Residency at Houston Methodist Hospital. She has published on critical care, medication safety, and informatics.

Plenary Session: "Empowering Comfort at Home: Leveraging Remote Health Monitoring Technology to Manage Cancer Pain"

Panel Session (moderator): "Transforming Patient Care Through Technology: Real-World Implementation"

Virginia LeBaron is the Kluge-Schakat Associate Professor of Compassionate Care at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. Her program of research focuses on leveraging technology to improve care for patients with advanced cancer and their care partners and is informed by her prior clinical work as an oncology nurse and palliative care nurse practitioner. Dr. LeBaron's research has been funded by the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and currently a Fellow in the Betty Irene Moore Nurse Leaders and Innovators program. From 2023-2024, she served as the AcademyHealth/National Cancer Institute Visiting Scholar.

Panel Session: "Transforming Patient Care Through Technology: Real-World Implementation"

Winston Liaw is a family physician, health services researcher, and the Chair of Health Systems and Population Health Sciences at the University of Houston Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. His research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence in primary care and assessing and addressing unmet social needs within primary care settings. Prior to joining the University of Houston, he was a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and was the Medical Director at the Robert Graham Center, a primary care policy research institute affiliated with the American Academy of Family Physicians. He also served as residency faculty at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Fairfax Family Medicine Residency Program. Dr. Liaw received a BA degree from Rice University, an MD from Baylor College of Medicine, an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health, family medicine residency training from Virginia Commonwealth University, and health policy fellowship training from the Robert Graham Center.

Plenary Session: "Bridging the Digital Divide: How AI Can Transform (or Fail) Geriatric Medication Safety"

Scott Nelson is a nationally recognized pharmacist and informaticist whose work bridges clinical practice, education and Health IT innovation. He serves as Associate Professor, Biomedical Informatics; Program Director, MS Applied Clinical Informatics (MS-ACI); Residency Program Director, PGY2 Pharmacy Informatics; Clinical Director, HealthIT, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At Vanderbilt, he leads efforts in medication safety informatics, focusing on medication reconciliation, e-prescribing, clinical decision support and the integration of artificial intelligence into clinical workflows. As program director of the MS-ACI program, he mentors the next generation of clinical informaticians through a curriculum grounded in real-world application. In addition, he serves as affiliate faculty at several colleges of pharmacy and serves as the residency program director for the PGY2 Pharmacy Informatics residency at Vanderbilt.