InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

25 CIOs Transforming Healthcare

1Comments | Paul Cerrato , Ken Terry , Marianne Kolbasuk McGee and Neil Versel | June 21, 2012 10:00 AM

InformationWeek Healthcare's second annual list of IT executives highlights the exceptional thinkers and doers who are moving patient care forward.

George Brenckle, UMass Memorial Health Care

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George Brenckle, UMass Memorial Health Care

Like many other top-flight healthcare systems, UMass Memorial Health Care sees the value of "big" data. Senior VP and CIO George Brenckle worked with Informatica, a data integration vendor, to aggregate and clean up the healthcare system's enterprise master patient index, giving users easy access to the data contained in more than 5 million patient records.

The system also lets UMass address some crucial questions that its transactional applications haven't been able to deal with. Among them: How many patients have been seen at UMass, and which of them are being seen at a primary care site in a specific time frame.

Under Brenckle's stewardship, UMass also has built an ICU "bunker," a central command center that's patched into the 10 ICUs in the hospital system and three external ICUs at community hospitals.

Specialists in the bunker have video and audio access to the ICUs and get real-time data on patients. The command center has been responsible for a 20% drop in mortality at UMass's ICUs since it was put in place, Brenckle said.

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