Peter Kizza ’18MHI Honors Family Legacy, Earns Doctorate Degree in Health Informatics

Peter Kizza ’18MHI is not the first in his family to earn a doctorate degree, but he is a graduate of the first cohort in the world to earn a Doctor of Health Informatics degree from UTHealth Houston McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics. Now the coordinator of clinical documentation and workflow EMR-Core for UF Health Physicians in Gainesville, Kizza had first seen the possibilities of earning the advanced degree after he receiving his fully online master’s in health informatics from the University of Central Florida.

Peter Kizza’s journey to his latest honor began long ago, through his parents, Rosie Chikwana-Kizza and the late Peter Nkedi-Kizza. Peter Nkedi-Kizza was born in Uganda and came to the University of Florida as a post-doctoral student in 1980.

That time marked  the beginning of eight years of terror for Uganda’s citizens; Peter Nkedi-Kizza could not have gone back to his country then even if he had wanted to. So, he stayed, built a career at the University of Florida for 38 years, and a life for him and Rosie Kizza and their three children. He retired as an emeritus professor of soil physics.

“Early on,” Kizza says, “Both my parents understood the value of an education. But they also realized that they had opportunities they could not take for granted, and they instilled the same values in my siblings and me. I think my parents knew that more education could be helpful for backup stability.”

Initially, Kizza was pursuing a career in clinical healthcare. He wanted to become a physician assistant and was majoring in biology. As part of the curriculum as an undergrad student at the University of Florida, Kizza was required to become a certified nursing assistant and to work a certain number of hours in a clinical setting.

“I was working with a urologist at his clinic, and he told me that I was really good at data analysis, and he told me I should look into health informatics,” Kizza says.

Kizza had never heard about the field, but when he started researching, he saw that UCF had one of the Florida’s best master’s programs. As he read more about the program, he realized that it sounded like “a really cool fit” with his own interests.

“I realized I could have a broader impact in healthcare and on patients through health informatics,” Kizza says. “I also chose UCF’s program because the University of Florida only offered a biomedical informatics program, and I felt that healthcare informatics was more in line with what I wanted to do.”

And even though Kizza could have stayed in the Gainesville area as he completed his fully online degree, he moved to Orlando briefly, thinking that his proximity to campus would be beneficial, in case he had questions about a course, or needed to chat with an instructor.

That was a nonissue, Kizza says. It was also ironic, because one of the best parts about the program was the internship for which he was accepted – that was back in Gainesville.

“UCF helped open the doors to networking with people who I probably would never have met,” Kizza says. “Real-life experience is a lot different than school experience, and the internship helped open my eyes to even more opportunities in the field, which then led me to pursuing a doctorate degree.”

After he received his master’s degree, Kizza established GatorIT, a healthcare informatics consultancy that provides IT support remotely or on-site.

“I felt it was important to obtain as much experience in the field as possible, because there were so many different ways that informatics can help improve or advance the patient experience,” Kizza says.

Earning one of the country’s first doctoral degrees in health informatics

Kizza became interested in the data that he gleaned from his practice’s telemedicine visits during the global pandemics. For his doctoral thesis, Kizza wanted to determine if the frequency of “no-show patients” was better for practices that offered telemedicine.

“At one of my former practices, they stopped using telemedicine as much after the pandemic,” Kizza says.

Even though most practices across the country utilized telemedicine during COVID, to continue it after COVID was not seen as beneficial. With Kizza’s research and recommendations, he demonstrated that to be successful at telemedicine, there were many moving parts and pieces that needed to be included in any practice that deployed telemedicine.

“Each clinic in my group had a dedicated ‘champion’ in each facility to explain the more technical side of telemedicine to the staff, and there was additional software that was needed – new dictation software, for example – to ensure a successful transition to telemedicine.”

Kizza was able to track three clinics in the same county that were not using telemedicine; and out of the three other clinics he was tracking, the data showed that they had experienced an increase in no-shows.

His thesis advisor told him that data was a normal consequence, so she helped him figure out why that had happened.

Ultimately, Kizza’s thesis showed via the data that the clinics that were practicing telemedicine vs. the clinics that were not had saved between $15-$20,000 due to using telemedicine.

In his current role, Kizza works on patient engagement programs where an automated system communicates through smartphones and delivers text messages to confirm or deny one’s appointment. That data allows the next patient in line to be “wait-listed” for the next appointment available.

“We are trying to get our patients into their appointments quicker and easier,” Kizza says, “And to decrease the number of no shows, because our data has shown that this is the issue that most of our practices have.”

Kizza says that UCF’s fully online master’s program offered him the perfect blending of real-world experiences and dynamic training that he continues to use today.

“Professor Lawrence West really helped me get more engaged with the curriculum, especially with some of the weaker points I had,” Kizza says. “UCF provided an iPad for students in the program; it helped turn a single monitor into a dual monitor – and they funded our entire cohort to go the HIMSS national convention. I didn’t realize how important this was until I actually started working in the field.”

Kizza says that UCF helped pave the way for where he is now in his career.

“Even though I came from an undergraduate degree in biology, UCF’s master’s program in health informatics really helped solidify my choice to change my career direction,” Kizza says. “The faculty and staff are just top-notch, and they had an impact on helping me get my current job, and they were so responsive to all of my many emails. I just can’t say enough about the program, and I encourage anyone who’s considering switching careers like I did to go for it.”

One thing he wasn’t prepared for after he completed his doctorate degree, however, was the amount of free time that he now has.

“I finished a little over a year ago,” Kizza says, “And sometimes I still wake up at 2 or 3 a.m. worried that I have homework due. It’s a weird feeling that I don’t have any homework now, but I think I can get used to it.”