As vice president of health informatics, Dr. Nahass leads systemwide initiatives to advance clinical technology, optimize the Epic EHR and enhance patient safety across New Jersey’s largest academic health system. He oversaw the rollout of the deterioration index early warning system, improving mortality outcomes in decompensating patients by 22%, and co-chairs the sepsis mortality committee, redesigning workflows to boost compliance and outcomes. During the 2024 Baxter IV fluid crisis, he implemented a data-driven conservation strategy using barcode tracking and Tableau dashboards, ultimately reducing usage by 44% without increasing mortality or acute kidney injury rates. Dr. Nahass also developed an autoCDI tool in Epic that minimizes documentation queries for physicians while accurately capturing care complexity. He also created advanced dashboards to track respiratory viral disease trends, enabling masking policy changes nearly two weeks ahead of CDC guidance. He leads the Epic physician builder program to engage tech-minded physician leaders in workflow innovation, contributing to the system achieving Epic “Gold Stars Level 10” for three consecutive years and placing it in the top 1% of Epic customers globally. Still practicing in the medical ICU, Dr. Nahass mentors residents and fellows, frequently presents at national critical care conferences and will lead a panel on AI in critical care this fall.
