David Muntz, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Baylor Health Care System (Dallas), was awarded the 2010 CHIME Innovator of the Year Award at the CHIME10 Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix, Ariz.
The award honors Muntz’s remarkable commitment to the healthcare IT field, in particular his work in addressing electronic health record (EHR) downtimes. Whether planned or unplanned, downtimes affected Baylor’s access to critical patient care information. After researching several ways to address a downtime situation, the Baylor Information Services team, under the direction of Muntz, hit upon a solution by reusing existing viewers which had already been developed and used for backup and pulling data from multiple sources to provide the needed information. By customizing clinical viewers to connect to these backup databases, patient data could be displayed online throughout a downtime. The project, dubbed the “Downtime Viewer” offers an immediate ‘view’ of all patient records until the application is back online.
The Downtime Viewer:
- Displays the up‐to‐date data in a familiar and easy format for clinicians
- Saves millions of dollars by re‐using existing database copies
- Provides a ideal solution to a previously labor and time intensive process
- Achieves unusually high business and clinical value
