Donna Woelfel

Donna Woelfel, MSN, RN, NI-BC, CHCIO, CDH-E serves as the inaugural Chief Nursing Informatics Officer (CNIO) for Northern California. In this newly created position, Donna assumes a pivotal role in developing strategy, optimizing technology, enhancing efficiency, and positively impacting clinicians and Kaiser Permanente’s patients. She serves as the strategic liaison for technology efforts representing clinician needs. In partnership with key peers among Patient Care Services, Medical Informatics, and Information Services leadership, she will help steer Kaiser Permanente’s efforts to incorporate clinical informatics, digital tools, innovative technology, and operational analytics into patient care to promote clinical excellence.

Donna brings more than 25 years of progressive Informatics, Information Technology leadership experiences at large integrated delivery system that includes development of clinical informatics programs and enterprise governance models. Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente in 2025, Donna served as the VP, Chief Nursing Information Officer at MultiCare Health System in Washington State, and VP, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Sutter Health, Northern California. Donna has led Epic refuels, Nursing Wellness Initiatives to optimize clinical documentation, flowsheets, nursing brain, best practice advisories, reducing documentation time and interruptive alerts while increasing net EMR experience scores. Donna also served as the associate CNIO at Intermountain Health, in Salt Lake City, Utah, supporting the Cerner implementations and as Clinical Informatics Director at Baylor Scott & White Health System. Donna is board certified in Nursing Informatics (NI-BC) by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) and additionally holds technology certifications as CHCIO, CDH-E through the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).

Donna earned a business degree from the University of North Dakota, which she combined with a BSN in nursing. She began her nursing journey in the Phoenix Metroplex, where she served as a critical care and emergency department nurse. Her passion for providing patient care in high-energy environments led her to obtaining a MSN in Nursing and concurrently she joined the team of Clinical Informaticists responsible for opening the new Mayo Clinical Hospital in Phoenix launching her Informatics career. Donna is passionate about harnessing the power of technology to support excellence in patient care and the clinician experience.