The Board of Directors of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has appointed Lynne Thomas Gordon as its new CEO. She will assume the post on Sept. 29, days before the launch of the organization’s annual conference, which begins Oct. 2 in Salt Lake City.
The group, which represents 61,000 health information management professionals, has been without a CEO since May, when then CEO Alan Dowling and COO Sandra Fuller stepped down. AHIMA executives declined to explain their departure.
Rose Dunn has been serving as interim CEO. Dunn has served twice on the AHIMA board of directors in the past, and has run her own consulting business in St. Louis for the past two decades.
Thomas Gordon joins AHIMA after serving as associate vice president for hospital operations and director of the Children’s Hospital at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. She is also a member of the Rush University faculty in the graduate program in health systems management.
Prior to Rush University Medical Center, Thomas Gordon served as the administrator of Houston Medical Center in Georgia and chief operating officer of Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Shands AGH in Florida. She started her health information management leadership career at Piedmont Hospital and progressed to positions of increasing responsibility in the health information and operations areas at Scottish Rite Children’s Medical Center in Atlanta.
Thomas Gordon holds active membership in AHIMA and the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). She has served on the information management taskforce of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and governor on the ACHE Board. She held several additional offices for ACHE and was awarded their Early Career Healthcare Executive Regent’s Award.
She is a past president and board director for the Georgia Health Information Management Association and a recipient of the GHIMA Distinguished Member Award. Thomas Gordon also has received AHIMA’s Achievement and Education-Practitioner Awards and has served on the AHIMA Nominating Committee and as a member of the House of Delegates.
