Healthcare IT News asked movers and shakers in the realm of healthcare information technology to identify up-and-coming leaders they would be watching in 2010. We asked them to consider leaders working in all aspects of healthcare IT – CIOs, policymakers, vendors, anyone who might shake things up at their own organization or nationally – who could be in the news now or perhaps still under the radar.

John Glaser, vice president and CIO at Partners Healthcare in Boston and an adviser to David Blumenthal, MD, who heads the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT, offered three candidates worth watching:

• Scott MacLean, CIO at Newton Wellesley Hospital in the Boston suburbs. "He will go on to be a great CIO of a health system some day," Glaser said.
• Adam Wright, an instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, part of the Partners Healthcare system in Boston. Glaser calls him a "rising superstar in the medical informatics community." "The overarching goal of my research is to improve quality of care and increase patient safety through innovative work in clinical systems and related areas of medical informatics," Wright writes in his profile on Harvard Catalyst, a social networking Web site. "To this end, my research has two principal focuses: clinical decision support and mining large warehouses of clinical data."
• Mat Kendall, who is responsible for the ONC-funded regional extension centers. Glaser calls him "a superb manager of very complex initiatives." Kendall, who has a Master's degree in public health, has served as director of operations for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Primary Care Information Project and as executive director of the Indian Health Center of Santa Clara Valley, a federally qualified health center in San Jose, Calif.

Denni McColm, CIO at Citizens Memorial Health in Bolivar, Mo., whose hospital is held up as a model for what small community hospitals can achieve with healthcare information technology, will be watching:

• Pam McNutt, who is senior vice president and CIO of the Methodist Health System in Dallas and a board member of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME). "I just met Pam, and she's my new role model," McColm said. "She's practical, connected and making a difference – at home at Methodist and in the broader policy arena."

William Spooner, vice president and CIO of Sharp Healthcare in San Diego, suggests keeping tabs on:

• Aneesh Chopra, the nation's chief technology officer. Chopra "is active in helping the committees decipher fact from fiction and determine how effectively we can adopt standards," Spooner said.
• Jonah Frolich, California's deputy secretary of health and human services for IT. "He's young, he's smart and hardworking," Spooner said. "He led the preparation of our state HIT strategic plan in a matter of a few months last summer. Jonah has organized grant-seeking processes to help California agencies to participate in workfoce training, regional extension centers, etc.. We'll be seeing Jonah for years to come."

Jay Srini, vice president of emerging technologies at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh Medical Center, suggests these leaders:

• Jeffrey Thompson, MD, CEO of Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Wis. – "an innovative champion of innovation."
• Stephen Klasko, MD, CEO of University of South Florida College of Medicine. He introduced social media into medical education, Srini said.
• Dan Martich, MD, CMIO at UPMC. Martich is under the radar, Srini said, but behind all the electronic record efforts at UPMC, responsible for EMR adoption at 21 hospitals.
• Greg Brandenburg, CEO, of the Columbia Basin Health Association in Othello, Wash. CBHA was recognized by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as one of the first community health centers in the country to fully transition to an electronic health record system.