Robert Bruno, a fourth-year pharmacy and health informatics and information management student at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, is the recipient of the 2016 American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Foundation’s Merit Scholarship. He will receive $2,500 for the John Kloss Memorial Veteran Scholarship. According to the foundation’s website, the scholarship is awarded to scholarship applicants who are veterans in memory of John Kloss, husband of former AHIMA Chief Executive Officer Linda Kloss, MA, RHIA, CAE, FAHIMA.
Bruno, a Memphis native, attended the University of Memphis for his undergraduate studies. He was also in the Tennessee Air National Guard, and volunteered for a year of active duty in 2004, spending eight months in Charleston, South Carolina, and four months at Manas Air Base, located near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Bruno eventually reached the rank of Staff Sergeant and served several years as an officer and was honorably discharged as a captain in 2011. Shortly after, Bruno enrolled in the dual Doctor of Pharmacy/Master of Health Informatics and Information Management degree program, which the University of Tennessee Health Science Center launched in 2015.
He is a pharmacy intern at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and credits the internship experience for his decision to seek a dual degree. “I have seen how important informatics is to pharmacy and other health care professions,” he said. “I have always had a knack for excel sheets and other software, and informatics takes it a much-needed step further.”
Bruno recently presented his research project, “Data Mining in the Electronic Medical Record to Reduce Alert Fatigue,” at the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists (ASHP) mid-year clinical meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Upon his graduation in May, Bruno plans to pursue a post graduate year one residency in Pharmacy. “After residency, I hope to find a pharmacy informatics job that is rewarding and also affords me the opportunity to do research,” he said.
For more information on the AHIMA Foundation and its scholarships, visit https://ahimafoundation.org/education/EligibilityRequirements.aspx.