On May 17, during the Healthcare Informatics Executive Summit, being held at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco, Healthcare Informatics will honor the three recipients of this year’s Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS IT Innovation Advocate Award, cosponsored by Healthcare Informatics magazine and the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems (AMDIS). For the third year in a row, the industry’s leading publication for healthcare IT leaders, and the nationwide association of CMIOs (chief medical information/informatics officers), will recognize outstanding individuals whose advocacy and implementation work has advanced the field of clinical informatics.
In addition, this year, Healthcare Informatics and AMDIS are pleased to announce that the award is being re-designated as the Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS James E. Levin Memorial IT Innovation Award, after James E. Levin, M.D., Ph.D., who at the time of his untimely death on Feb. 10 of this year, was CMIO at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Levin was widely lauded by his colleagues across the healthcare IT world as a pioneer in leveraging clinical IT for clinical performance improvement and patient safety advancement. Indeed, in 2010, Dr. Levin and his colleagues at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh were named the first-place winning team in the Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards program, for their creation of a workflow-friendly ICU solution for immediate data availability for clinicians.
This year’s recipients of the Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS IT Innovation Advocate Award, henceforth to be known as the Healthcare Informatics/AMDIS James E. Levin Memorial IT Innovation Award, are Neal Patel, M.D., CMIO of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville (first place); John Mattison, M.D., Assistant Medical Director and CMIO of Kaiser Permanente-Southern California, Pasadena (second place); and Michael Zaroukian, M.D., Ph.D., vice president and CMIO, Sparrow Health, Lansing, Mich. (third place).
Each of these three CMIOs has shown exceptional leadership in his clinical informatics and process change leadership.
Among his many achievements, Michael Zaroukian, M.D., Ph.D. has been leading efforts at Sparrow Health, an integrated health system based in Lansing, Mich., not only to complete implementation of that organizations electronic health record (EHR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems, but also to optimize usage of those systems, including for evidence-based best practices and the reduction of unjustified variations in care. Not only are Dr. Zaroukian and his colleagues doing ongoing work to deeply embed evidence-based clinical decision support into physician practice at Sparrow, they have also been implementing a version of their organization’s patient portal into place in a bedside version for hospital patients, eventually planning to deploy it on iPads. They have also deployed the use of iPads on a stroke unit in order to support remote monitoring and some emergency transport. Earlier in his career, Dr. Zaroukian was a major participant in the early-web entity called GratefulMed, which eventually became PubMed, and created widespread online access for physicians to the medical literature.
Michael Zaroukian, M.D.
John Mattison, M.D. has been a key leader in the concepting, development, and execution of Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® and KP Online, which have been elements in the nationwide patient-centric care/electronic initiative at the Kaiser Permanente organization. Through KP HealthConnect, all 9 million Kaiser Permanente health plan members nationwide have the benefit of a complete or partial KP HealthConnect online record available to them; all Kaiser Permanente medical facilities are live with KP HealthConnect; 3.9 million members have been registered to My Health Manager, a personal health record solution; 2.5 million lab results flow online monthly through the system; 827,000 prescriptions are refilled online monthly; and 230,000 appointments are scheduled monthly. The recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Mattison is currently involved in planning for the development of advanced decision support systems around genomics, proteomics, and other medical advances. He has been an active participant in an extremely broad array of health data standards and health information exchange collaborative, and has authored numerous articles on clinical informatics and clinical transformation.
Neal Patel, M.D. has been a driving force in clinical transformation work at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Among his achievements there to date has been the creation of what he and his colleagues call the “team summary” concept, which is working to turn simple standardized templates into advanced documentation tools that incorporate data analysis modules and modular capture of clinical content, allowing physicians to document more efficiently, and to share patient record information more efficiently with each other, through an aggregate-view solution. He has also helped lead his colleagues in an initiative around what they are calling “integrated presence”—a real-time patient risk monitoring solution that allows clinicians to quickly assess the clinical situation of any patient. That solution is currently being piloted in the burn unit at the hospital, and is expected to be expanded onto other units during the current calendar year.
In announcing the names of the award recipients on behalf of Healthcare Informatics and AMDIS, HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland said, “We at Healthcare Informatics and AMDIS are thrilled to be able to recognize the achievements of these healthcare IT leaders, who have given of their time and their efforts to promote the advancement of care quality and patient safety through the intelligent leveraging of healthcare information technology. The achievements of Drs. Patel, Mattison, and Zaroukian represent the highest levels of accomplishment in our industry, and highlight the virtually limitless opportunities for clinical transformation through the leveraging of IT going forward into the future.”
For further information on the awards program, please contact Mark Hagland at [email protected].
