CIO of the year: John Halamka

John Halamka holds many different prestigious titles which include: CIO of Beth Israel Medical Center, CIO at Harvard Medical School, Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, among other titles. During his presentation John Halamka explained his career and what is expected of him. It's no surprise that Loyola has chosen John Halamka as CIO of this academic year.

Dr. Halamka's life is very demanding, he is constantly making important decisions. Dr. Halamka focused a portion of his presentation on how he faces many demands during the day but cannot meet most of these demands. He mentioned that for him it is important to budget his time and allot enough time to speak with the people he finds most demanding and difficult. Dr. Halamka joked that he wears a certain kind of suit just incase someone throws water at him (which someone did)! The title of CIO is very challenging and tends to be too much for most people, according to Dr. Halamka most CIOs only hold their position for about two years. Dr. Halamka has been holding his position for 10 years, which shows he must be doing something right!

Dr. Halamka gave an example of a time when his job as CIO was not easy. He spoke about an instance where one of his former employees breached a privacy standard and stole tons of records from one of the hospitals computers. He explained that when something to this degree happens the hospital is responsible for publishing the breach in the media. Luckily for Dr. Halamka the previous day a huge story unfolded which took the spotlight to his incident. In this case Dr. Halamka held full responsibility because of his position as CIO. Through this example it's easy to see why most CIOs only last two years.

As Dr. Halamka continued on with his presentation he noted that he is involved with many different IT projects right now. One project include Radio Frequency Identification Tags. I found this project particularly interesting because the night before the presentation I had been researching Radio Frequency Identification Tags for my Strategy and IT outline. In my company (Wal-Mart) they were implementing these tags as well. It was interesting to see how differently the same IT product can be used in a store such as Wal-Mart and also in a hospital.

Dr. Halamka also mentioned that he is involved in projects which will allow for electronic medical records and electronic prescriptions. As we spoke about in class the other day, this seems like a hot topic because of privacy.

Overall I found Dr. Halamka to be a very interesting person. He seemed so down to earth and level headed as he spoke and carried himself much like a businessman; it was hard for me to picture him as an emergency room doctor. I really enjoyed this presenter and agree that he deserves the title of Loyola's CIO of the year.

John Halamka: CIO of the Year

John Halamka gave a very interesting and attention grabbing presentation on the role of a CIO. His job specifically, as a CIO in a hospital, holds particular significance in that he has to work under the tight budgets that hospitals have. When a hospital has to decide between new medical equipment and new technological advancements, it is not always easy to convince the board on the importance and future value that these advancements may have. One particularly interesting point that John made in his talk was the potential availability of patients medical records to all doctors on a nationwide, or even global, network. This is particularly interesting to me, as we discussed in the last class, as this availability of medical records could lead to a future with less privacy guarantees. The project is very intriguing as emergency personnel could access records very quickly and best treat for their patients. I am very eager to see where this technology goes in the future and where the future of information availability and sharing may go.

John Halamka- CIO of the YEAR

            I decided from the presentation that John Halamka would be the ultimate person to have in your family. He both knows the answers to any medical questions which his 15 years practicing in the ER and he has the answers to anything involving technology. He stressed, “demand will always exceed the supply”. He also said that the CIO industry is very demanding in that most people do not last more than 2 years due to such factors as stress. He has been around for over 10 years as CIO and he said 3 things haven’t changed; budgets tight, vendors poor quality, customers difficult. In making making decisions he relies on “goverance” a committee which votes on decision to make and then once they make a choice, Halamaka and his team employ them. This is a resource allocation committee and they do return on analysis and decide what gets funded and what doesn’t. The problem with money is that he said there is the problem where would a hospital spend its money…to save a young child dying of cancer, or update computer software? He also discussed a mess up which involved a mix up with slides determining if patients had prostate cancer. The slides got switched and one patient got treated who wasn’t sick and the sick patient didn’t get treatment. This was a huge screw up that he and his team worked to streamline. This screw up went to the papers but he said luckily bigger things were going on that day in the media like a state of the union address. He talked about the problem with getting private doctors trained with new technology at hospitals. He sends out team members to train them. He said due to money, companies will never all be on the same system, and other countries are very far behind on the organized IT infrastructure his hospital runs. In closing, his company just got many government funded grants to expand their IT infrastructure so he is very excited. 

John Halamka: CIO of the Year

John D. Halamka, is an MD, MS, Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Chief Information Officer at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network, Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel and a practicing Emergency Physician.

John D. Halamka’s presentation and explained what he did for his job, how to deal with the technological evolution, the environment where he worked, what projects he was working on, and how to stick up for what he believed would work in his job. In his job the demand always exceeded the supply, the skill set is very complex and the turnover of technological, organization and budgetary change was very high. Every day he learns how to deal with the evolution of the Internet. He stated that the similarities of the job in the past 10 years have not changed. The similarities include that vendors are poor quality, budgets are tight and customers remain difficult to please because they receive so much information from the Internet.

The Environment that John Halamka works in is very interesting. The project priorities are driven by Return on Investment and Benchmarking. The ventilators replacement competes with the Information technology project. For all of his projects the capital is limited at all levels and they are continuous external pressures. Everything that goes wrong is usually based on IT so his company continuously has to keep updating, paying for performance and improving quality and safety.

John Halamka came up with a set of rules about how to say no to patients or to other problems or questions in life. Select what to change and what not to change, Identify those who will loose, acknowledge loss, over communicate information, be honest and consistent about the problem or disease, consensus is not essential, embrace and offer support in time of conflict, focus on distracters, the last two minutes of the meeting or conversation is the most important and finally you cannot please everyone in meetings or patients.

At this moment in time he is working on many projects. These projects are Electornic health records for the non-owned doctor. Storages as utility which is a penebite of clinical data research. The Idea of E-prescribing is be used around American and there is a strong authentication for this idea. He is working on the security of the company’s private patient documents. His project about Data sharing is for clinical care among the community care givers but there is a lot of non consistency throughout the states so all the laws are different.

John D. Halamka’s presentation was very interesting and I am happy that I attended.

CIO of the year: John Halamka

John D. Halamka holds the Chief Information Officer position of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center among various other prestigious titles. I found his lecture very interesting because he informed us about the challenges he is faced as a CIO but also the exciting aspects of it such as his new projects. I learned that one of the major obstacles in a company’s project development is allocating capital. Capital is limited at all levels for all products so all the different projects are competing for some share of the money. Mr. Halamka’s IT projects have to compete with other projects regarding things such as ventilator replacements and premature babies. While this is a difficult task morally, it is also a difficult task in the business sense. He must show his projects return on investments and all its benefits in order to receive the funding his projects require. Another issue they face is in relation to the increasing sophistication of patients. IT for hospitals is now not only geared at doctors so it now has to be external so information can be shared. In order to fix this, they are creating an intranet which is a collaboration of information and spaces for all the server’s users.

What I found most interesting about his lecture was all the different projects he is currently working on. I was especially impressed by the e-Prescribing in which all a person’s past prescriptions will be stored so that the one prescribing it will know whether or not the medication is right for the patient. The patient will then be able to send their prescription to any pharmacy at which they want to have it filled. There is also an IT project that is creating a data sharing network for clinical care among a community of caregivers. Another project dealt with RFID and bar coding. Bar codes are given to each patient, nurse and medicine. When a nurse administers medicine to a patient, they scan the patient’s bar code, their own bar code and the bar code on the medication. This is to ensure that the right medication is being given to the right patients at the right time. RFID is used to track inventory and devices. Other projects included topics such as decision support, compliance requirements, internal and external websites and disaster recovery.

The reason why I was so interested in this lecture was that it could potentially directly relate to me. All these projects, or ones very similar, could be projects of my own in the future. If I become a CIO of a company, I may have to be the one to balance increasing demands with a decreasing budget. I also may have to perform almost impossible tasks of an IT person such as predicting a required amount of memory that is not too much or too little like Mr. Halamka is faced with. Hearing about the things he does at work made me very excited to start my career as an IT person so I will be able to apply all the skills that we are acquiring in class.

John Halamka

John Halamka, held a discussion regarding the roles of a CIO in today’s healthcare industry. Dr. Halamka is the CIO for Harvard Medical School and Beth Isreal Deaconess Medidcal Center and spoke about the day to day challenges and required skill sets in his line of work. The main theme of the lecture was the growing influence of IT in all aspects of business and the need for future skilled IT workers. Dr. Halamka explained the constant demands he faces throughout the day and although he would love to complete all of them, 90% will never develop simply due to the constant change in available revenue, changing information and technology, and structure within the employees. IT is one of the most important aspects of Dr. Halamka’s job, he is constantly using it to develop new software, improve software, and change the way information is shared. He explained how there he was a need for improved information sharing between doctors and doctors as well as doctors and patients. He developed an electronic way to make this happen so he can now prescribe medicine to a patient from a computer without actually seeing a patient for a follow up visit. This is just a small part of what he has accomplished and I was very impressed by his list.

In Conclusion, I was very interested and actually entertained by the lecture. Dr. Halamka was very informative and funny at the same time through the use of his stories, which explained the importance of IT in his line of work. Also, I found the class of water on the Kevlar suit pretty memorable as well.

CIO of the year: John Halamka

John Halamka, Chief Information Officer for several medical centers such as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, discussed what he does as a CIO and the high demand for IT in a rapidly changing environment. From the lecture, I learned that healthcare is a challenging environment to work in and CIOs must balance increasing demands with skimming budgets on a daily basis. He explained that important skills that CIOs need to possess are technological expertise, domain expertise, leadership skills, and change management skills. One thing he mentioned was that demands will always exceed supply and that 90% of requests that are asked of him actually cannot be done because of the complexity that goes into completing them. Many of the requests are difficult to carry out because there is constant change with technology, organization, and budgets. As a CIO, it is important that John keeps up with the updated technology because of how quickly it changes and his job requires him to know different technologies. Another reason is because there are external pressures, such as the patients as his hospital demanding enhanced IT (for example: the ability to see their records, etc.) He explained that the Harvard Medical School uses IT that allows them to query patient records in the hospital which are broken down into sensitive parts. Another large factor that John deals with as a CIO is the limited amount of capital that he has to work with. Essentially, CIOs need to be smart about which information technologies are wiser to invest their budget in because the budgets are not very high. He emphasized that a large part of working as a CIO is that you cannot please everyone and he even told us several ways to say “No” to people because it is a big part of what he does in his profession.
Overall, I thought the lecture was pretty interesting because the things John explained to us are the things we have discussed in class, which is the idea of using IT in business intelligence. It was interesting to hear about the different kinds of IT and how vital they are for businesses that use information on a daily basis (like hospitals keeping track of their patient records). I think John’s job is also interesting because he travels a decent amount and gets to observe other countries’ IT compared to ours in the U.S.