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.