CIO Profiles: John D. Halamka Of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

Career Track

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

IT budget: $35 million operating, $10 million capitalSize of IT team: 250Top initiatives:

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

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

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 Ranked No. 12 in the 2011