2005 - CEO IT Achievement Award

When Merck Pharmaceuticals pulled anti-arthritis drug Vioxx from the shelves on Sept. 30, 2004, Evanston (Ill.) Northwestern Healthcare determined that it hadabout 2,700 patients on the drug and notified their doctors, who then called the patients with a substitute prescription.The three-hospital system with 65 medicaloffices did this “within minutes and hours, asopposed to days and weeks,” by using its integratedelectronic health-records system, drivenby computerized physician-order entry, saysTom Smith, chief information officer. “It’s
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George Halvorson’s respect for the importance of technology came—at least partly—out of Africa.From 1997 to 2001, Halvorson,now chairman and chief executive officerof Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals,spent weeks at a time in Uganda. He washelping the company he formerly headed,HealthPartners, create health plan cooperativesin which the local villagers paid for their healthcarecoverage in milk, tea leaves or coffee beans.The monthly premium amounted to about$1 per member.“We figured our administrative costs would
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Early in his career as a healthcare chief executive officer, Joel Allison learned the hard way about how not to approach investments in information technology.When he arrived at a hospital in CorpusChristi, Texas, as the new CEO, nursesworking near the laboratory had two computersat their station—one for a recentlyinstalled laboratory system and another forthe hospital’s billing system. The problem:The information systems staff couldn’t integratethe two systems.“The staff had to enter the informationtwice. You can’t have two systems. It was
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This year’s winners of Modern Healthcare’s CEO IT Achievement Award, co-sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, are true champions. All three of these leaders know that safe and cost-effective patient care isn’t possible without easy access to abundant and reliable information.But success in this arena requires more thana sophisticated business strategy and an ampleIT budget. It also requires leaders who will stepforward and accept accountability for projectsthat often are on technology’s bleeding edge. All
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Welcome to our third annual supplement profiling the winners of the CEO IT Achievement Award, sponsored by Modern Healthcare and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. On the following pages, you’ll meet the three winners for 2005.They are Joel Allison, president and chiefexecutive officer of the Baylor Health CareSystem in Dallas; George Halvorson, chairmanand CEO of Kaiser Foundation HealthPlan and Hospitals in Oakland, Calif.; andMark Neaman, president and CEO ofEvanston (Ill.) Northwestern Healthcare.
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