Career Track

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	John D. Halamka CIO, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

How long at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: 15 years

Career accomplishment I'm most proud of: Creating clinical systems that are recognized for patient safety, quality improvement, and efficiency gains. BIDMC has been a learning laboratory for exchange of health information, and we're sharing summaries electronically for care coordination and aggregating data electronically for quality measurement.

Most important career influencer: John Glaser, former CIO of Partners Healthcare, now CEO of Siemens Healthcare. He taught me how to use IT strategically to align the needs of the business with technology enablers.

On The Job

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IT budget: $35 million operating, $10 million capital

Size of IT team: 250

Top initiatives:

Implement ICD-10, the major conversion of all hospital clinical and financial systems to a new vocabulary required by the federal government by Oct. 1, 2013. Focus on inpatient documentation, part of our effort to create the paperless hospital by 2015. Use of integrated medication management, ensuring that medications are given at the right time to the right patient in the right dose--from the doctor's brain to the patient's vein without any errors.

How I measure IT effectiveness: Infrastructure success is measured as 99.99% uptime. Apps are measured by user satisfaction and workflow improvement. We've cut emergency department length of stay by 45 minutes per patient.

Vision

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The next big thing for my industry will be ... mobility. We have more than 1,000 iPads using our Web-based applications today. Clinicians are mobile people and need to view results, enter orders, and communicate with team members at the bedside.

Lesson learned from the recession: It's far better to focus on incremental forward progress than to focus on economic bad news.

The federal government's top tech priority should be ... secure transport standards that empower care coordination, public health reporting, and population health management by enabling safe transmission of data.

Personal

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Colleges/degrees: Stanford, BS/BA; University of California, San Francisco, MD; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MS; Harvard, MS

Leisure activities: Hiking, climbing, kayaking

Favorite president: Presidents can't be successful in office--they have infinite responsibility but limited authority--but Jimmy Carter is our best "post-president" based on his books and humanitarian actions

If I weren't a CIO, I'd be ... an organic farmer in Vermont