Dr. Hilliman holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Criminal Justice and also has a Master of Public Administration Degree. Dr. Hilliman has spent more than 7 years in IT project management in varying capacities and has over 15 years of IT experience.

During the Y2K transition at the Columbia University-Medical center she was the Project Leader for the WebCIS project (a web-based clinical application) and worked with a core group of users, the UNIX administrators, the hospital′s Core resources network group, desktop support and a variety of vendors to transition the hospital from a mainframe clinical system to a new web-based clinical information system.

In this capacity she maintained the $1.75 million annual budget for the WebCIS project and was instrumental in the hiring of the WebCIS team that remains in place to date. Since then she has worked on a longitudinal study with an 8-year budget of $56 million (IDEATel project). The study spans the entire New York State where telemedicine services were provided to an elderly diabetic population. Her experience has called for collaboration with end-users, clinicians and vendors as well as evaluation and assessment of the project on an annual basis.

Dr. Hilliman has also managed varying personnel which include administrative staff, field trainers, network analysts, database administrators and software development programmers. Additionally, Dr. Hilliman has collaborated on several articles written about the IDEATel project and hopes to publish more on telemedicine and the use of technology to extend access to medically underserved populations such as prisoners and those in rural communities.