Dr. Dorothy O’Hagan serves as the Academic Director for the Master of Science in Health Care Informatics program and is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of San Digeo Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science.
Dr. O’Hagan earned her PhD in Leadership Studies and her master’s degree in Leadership and Nonprofit Management from the University of San Diego. Her dissertation, Investigating the Impact of Employment and Demographic Factors on Health Among Bereaved Adults: A Quantitative Approach, examined bereavement, employment-related factors, and self-reported health among working-age adults. Her doctoral work reflects her broader interest in leadership, workplace support, health, and the human side of healthcare organizations.
Dr. O’Hagan is a Registered Health Information Administrator and Certified Coding Specialist. She also holds a BA in Health Administration and an AS in Medical Record Technology. Before joining USD full-time, she served as Senior Director of Clinical and Health Information Systems at Rady Children’s Health. In that role, she oversaw Epic, the organization’s electronic health record, as well as other clinical and health information systems that supported care delivery, documentation, communication, data exchange, reporting, and daily clinical operations.
Dr. O’Hagan has more than 30 years of experience leading healthcare projects, teams, and information systems. During her career at Rady Children’s Health, she served in several roles, including Coding Manager, Cancer Registrar, Hospital Billing and Collections Manager, EMR Systems Analyst, Director of Health Information, Chief Privacy Officer, and leader for interoperability and documentation excellence. These roles gave her a broad view of how health information moves through an organization and how documentation, data quality, system design, workflow, and communication affect both clinical teams and patients.
Her professional work has focused on electronic health records, health information exchange, patient identity matching, documentation integrity, interoperability, revenue cycle, and the use of health information to support safe and effective care. She has served on national workgroups focused on patient identity matching and interoperability, and was an elected member of Epic’s Electronic Medical Record International Care Everywhere Governance Council from 2013 to 2016.