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.