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.