Sutter Health wins Innovator of the Year Award at CHIME Fall CIO Forum

The College of Health Information Management Executives' 2013 Fall CIO Forum wrapped up Friday in Scottsdale, Ariz., with a spate of announcements and award presentations.

CHIME used the forum to ballyhoo the cutting-edge work of two healthcare organizations and two health information technology developers. It presented Sutter Health, Sacramento, Calif., with its Innovator of the Year Award for equipping its clinical workforce with 1,000 mobile tablets for use in home health and hospice locations across northern California.

Sutter's information systems director, Philip Chuang, who led the project, also received the $5,000 Bill W. Childs/SAIC Innovator Scholarship, named for the health IT pioneer and CHIME Lifetime Achievement Award winner who helped build the first hospital computerized physician order entry system installed at El Camino Hospital in the early 1970s. Childs was in attendance at the CHIME forum.

CHIME also named Trinity Health, now CHE Trinity Health, Livonia, Mich., and Cerner Corp., of Kansas City, Mo., winners of its Collaboration Award, for a computer-assisted inpatient sepsis reduction program. Trinity officials report the program, in place across 23 hospitals, has saved more than 500 patient lives using real-time data inputs and computer algorithms to identify and alert clinicians to the early signs of the often fatal infections. The system also provides clinicians with evidence- and consensus-based sepsis treatment protocols.

CHIME also announced it had signed a letter of intent to partner with Next Wave Connect, a Houston-based developer of a social networking and collaboration platform. The cloud-based platform will to be used as a “collaborative tool for CIOs,” according to Next Wave CEO Drexel DeFord, a former CHIME board chairman. Terms of the deal are still being negotiated and were not announced.

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