Nurses Carol Bickford and Kathleen Smith and Dr. Russell Leftwich were named winners of the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's clinician information technology leadership awards.

Bickford is a senior policy fellow in the department of nursing practice for the American Nurses Association in Silver Spring, Md. Smith is chief nursing informatics officer for Rockville, Md.-based Care Systems, a hospital staff scheduling and management software. Together they are winners of the HIMSS Nursing Informatics Leadership Award. Bickford and Smith serve as managing partners of Informatics Consulting & Continuing Education, Olney, Md., where they team up to provide courses in informatics across the country.

"We've done 110 workshops and taught more than 4,000 people since 2005," Smith said in a telephone interview.

Joyce Sensmeier, HIMSS vice president of informatics, said in a news release that the accomplishments and examples set by Bickford and Smith "demonstrate the important role that nurses play as leaders in advancing the best use of health IT to improve health outcomes."

Leftwich, the winner of the HIMSS Physician IT Leadership Award, is the chief medical informatics officer of the Tennessee State Office of eHealth, which promotes health IT and health information exchange among providers across the state. He is a member of the HIMSS management engineering and process improvement and physician communities and serves on the society's physician leadership committee and on the board of the HIMSS Tennessee chapter.