HealthlinkNY Welcomes Helene Kopal of Katonah to Its Board of Directors

Helene Kopal, whose initial work in disease management led her to focus on health information technology to drive change, has been elected to the HealthlinkNY Board of Directors. Ms. Kopal currently is the Senior Director of Integrated Delivery Systems Operations at the Center for Regional Healthcare Innovation (CRHI) at WMCHealth in Hawthorne, New York. She is responsible for IT and other systems and processes that together will create an integrated delivery system under the New York State DSRIP (Delivery Services Reform Incentive Payment) initiative.

“Helene brings many strengths to our board, including strategic thinking and health IT expertise,” says Christina Galanis, President & CEO of HealthlinkNY. “In her current role, she is promoting data sharing among DSRIP Provider Payer System network partners, which includes the deployment and use of interoperable medical records and connections to Health Information Exchanges such as HealthlinkNY.”

To Ms. Kopal, HealthlinkNY’s role in improving population health is important. “I have spent most of my career assisting providers deploy and use technology to improve their operations and patient outcomes,” she explains. “A role on the HealthlinkNY board provides the expanded perspective of improving the health and well-being of entire communities.”

Ms. Kopal, a resident of Katonah, New York, joined CRHI in 2014 after spending a decade leading health IT (HIT)-driven change among safety net health care providers. She served as the Executive Director of Hudson Information Technology for Community Health and Director of Emerging Initiatives at Primary Care Development Corporation. Her HIT experience also includes inpatient and outpatient system implementations, systems testing, and strategic planning as a Consulting Senior at Ernst & Young. Early on in her career, Ms. Kopal worked at Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield and Oxford Health Plans, where she oversaw disease management and health improvement initiatives leveraging clinical and claims data to identify and manage at-risk health plan members.

Ms. Kopal earned both an MPA in public administration and an MPH in health policy and management from Columbia University. She was graduated with a BA in History from Connecticut College.

About HealthlinkNY

HealthlinkNY is a Qualified Entity (QE), funded by the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH), which operates the health information exchange (HIE) as well as population health improvement programs (PHIP), supports healthcare delivery reform (DSRIP) and fosters collaboration among public and private health plans (CPC) for an 11 county region spanning the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Southern Tier of New York. The HealthlinkNY HIE offers electronic access to patients’ community-wide health records and serves as the region’s access point to the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), supporting collaboration between healthcare providers across the state.