What do you see as your primary mission as CIO?
The prime mission of the CIO is to help the organization achieve its mission. The CIO needs to champion the intelligent use of technology, manage the IT operations, and help ensure that the organization is using data to create research and clinical value.
What is your proudest achievement as CIO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering?
The creation of a Web-based HIPAA compliant data warehouse with over one million cancer patient records. Prior to this system staff had to wait several days or weeks to have a "power user" extract data from our systems. Now a researcher can sit on the Web and create successive queries to examine a hypothesis and find those patients who satisfy the query and have a consented tissue sample.
What has been your greatest challenge?
Because we are almost entirely online, everyone needs access to computers round the clock. Creating an environment and the support staff to provide an extraordinary level of service at all times has been a challenge we have been able to meet.
How will the role of healthcare information technology change in the years ahead?
Healthcare will be all digital and interconnected. We as an industry are being asked to solve a good portion of the healthcare problem through more widespread use of healthcare information technology. I believe that the next two or so years will be the most exciting ones for our industry. I hope we can look back and say this has been a job well done.
What do you see as the greatest opportunity for healthcare IT?
In addition to interconnecting healthcare records I believe we have the opportunity to drive down costs and make our operations more efficient and effective by ensuring that evidence based medicine is practiced everywhere.
What is your best advice to beginning CIOs who desire to make a meaningful contribution?
It is important to assess the capabilities of the organization and then sell and implement a vision that can be achieved in manageable increments. However, never forget that the trains need to run on time.
What are you reading?
The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus. Harold is the president of MSKCC, a Nobel Prize winner in medicine and the former head of NIH, the National Institutes of Health.
