Top 25 Clinical Informaticists (text list)

Dr. Gregory Ator, 55, is chief medical informatics officer at 606-bed University of Kansas Hospital, Kansas City. Ator was the leading physician champion in the development of the O2 clinical information system, which combines an EHR with elements aimed at eliminating redundant testing and expediting delivery of clinical information to relevant providers. He is a practicing otolaryngologist and associate professor of otolaryngology. He created and led a team of informatics physicians and a physician informatics liaison nurse to enable full physician participation in the EHR system.

Dr. Colin Banas, 36, is chief medical information officer at 744-bed Virginia Commonwealth University Health System, Richmond. He helped create a dashboard embedded in the organization's commercial EHR system that monitors the status of vulnerable patients and gives clinicians an early warning of major problems. Banas led implementation of a referring provider portal for outside physicians to access the EHR. He also automated primary-care physician notification of patient ER visits and admissions through the EHR.

Dr. Richard Bankowitz, 55, is chief medical officer for the Premier healthcare alliance, Charlotte, N.C. As Premier's lead informaticist, Bankowitz designed and is implementing quality-improvement measures used in the organization's safety and quality-improvement database launched three years ago. The initiative to analyze clinical performance and to implement improvements was credited with saving thousands of lives and billions of dollars at its charter member hospitals over three years. Bankowitz, a board-certified internist, also helped design an industry standard information management capability road map for coordinating accountable care.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, 46, is associate chief medical officer for innovation at 854-bed Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, and medical director of IT and innovation at Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group. Berkowitz led the medical group initiative to go paperless in 2003 and to meet Stage I meaningful-use criteria in 2011. His group also launched a patient portal in 2006 used by 80,000 patients to send 20,000 unique messages each month. Berkowitz has led several pilots at the hospital, including the development and implementation of an EHR-enabled care-coordination system now used systemwide.

Dr. Joe Boyce, 55, is chief medical information officer at 352-bed Heartland Health, St. Joseph, Mo. He led implementation of the hospital's computerized physician order entry project for more than 200 physicians and use of a bar-coded medication initiative to improve patient safety. Boyce led a collaboration effort by Kansas City-area CMIOs to transition a Heartland information exchange into one shared and governed by competing hospitals. Boyce also led his hospital to achieve the advanced Stage 6 of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's EHR adoption model in his first year at Heartland.

Dr. William Bria, 61, is co-founder and president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems and formerly was chief medical information officer at the Shriners Hospitals for Children system, Tampa, Fla. AMDIS has worked with the CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on meaningful-use requirements in the EHR incentive program and other national informatics programs. Bria has served as an adviser at the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health. He has developed a peer-reviewed informatics journal and co-edited a handbook for CMIOs.

Pamela Ferrari, 63, is director of clinical informatics at Open Door Family Medical Centers, Ossining, N.Y. She led an effort to mine data from the federally qualified community health center's EHR that led to development of an organizationwide performance-monitoring program. She developed clinical report cards for key clinical metrics organized by provider and site to gauge performance and progress. The National Committee for Quality Assurance credited such improvements when it designated the provider a patient-centered medical home in 2010 as well as when it recognized the organization for diabetes care in 2011.

Dr. William Hersh, 54, is a professor and chairman of the department of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology at the school of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, Portland. Hersh directs one of the nation's largest academic informatics programs, which pioneered distance-learning to allow professionals nationwide to access the program. Hersh is helping to lead development of curriculum materials for short-term training programs in health IT at community colleges, under a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Liz Johnson, 60, is vice president of applied clinical informatics at Tenet Healthcare Corp., Dallas. Johnson has overseen full EHR implementation at 26 of the for-profit health system's hospitals in 22 months and plans to complete installations in all of the hospitals within the next year and a half. Johnson oversaw development of a process that produces individual dashboards for each hospital's meaningful-use progress on all Stage 1 indicators and preliminarily tracks Stage 2.

Dr. David Kaelber, 44, is chief medical informatics officer for 559-bed MetroHealth System, Cleveland. Kaelber led MetroHealth's first systemwide EHR implementation. He has mined data from the EHR for multiple published clinical studies; additionally, his findings led to a change in a treatment protocol for all MetroHealth dentists to include taking the blood pressure of their pediatric patients. He also led the system's widespread sharing of clinical information between providers, which is credited with a range of benefits including a 20% drop in hospitalizations.

Dr. Joe Kimura, 39, is medical director of clinical reporting and analytics at Atrius Health, Newton, Mass. Kimura leads data-focused efforts at the alliance of six not-for-profit community-based physician groups, which was named a Medicare Pioneer accountable care organization in December 2011. He coordinated the adjustments needed for the informatics systems to quickly integrate large influxes of patient data from disparate sources to carry out the care-coordination model under the ACO. His efforts to integrate Medicare claims data have allowed the creation of clinician reports used to modify their patient care.

Dr. Kevin Land, 44, is senior medical director of field operations at Blood Systems, Scottsdale, Ariz. Land pushed for nationwide implementation of a donor hemo-vigilance analysis and reporting tool that he helped develop in partnership with HHS. Twenty of about 70 donor centers—owned by different entities—are in various stages of implementing the free system. The system is the first to capture donor-related data based on standardized symptoms instead of subjective diagnoses. The system moves beyond data collection to allow the organizations to make local process improvements and improve donor safety.

Dr. Howard Landa, 55, is chief medical information officer at Alameda County Medical Center, Oakland, Calif., where he is implementing ambulatory and acute-care electronic health-record systems. He previously was director of medical informatics at Hawaii Permanente Medical Group, Honolulu. Landa, a practicing pediatric urologist, is also chairman of the HIMSS/AMDIS Physician Community. He is a prolific researcher and has authored numerous published articles on various aspects and challenges of healthcare IT.

Dr. Louis Leff, 53, is a professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh and medical director for e-records at UPMC Shadyside Hospital, Pittsburgh. Leff established and leads a multidisciplinary team across UPMC's 11 hospitals that develops the standardized order sets embedded in the system's EHR. Leff, who is board-certified in geriatric and internal medicine, also developed a Web-based application to organize the use of order sets. The application's report cards also are credited with spurring use of computerized physician order entry among the system's IT-resistant physicians.

Dr. Christopher Longhurst, 37, is chief medical information officer at 302-bed Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Palo Alto, Calif., and a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In November 2011, Longhurst authored a published case report on the first-time use of aggregate EHR data to make real-time patient-care decisions. Longhurst, a board-certified pediatric hospitalist, continues to help lead the hospital through implementation of a comprehensive EHR.

Dr. David Milov, 57, is chief of clinical informatics at Nemours health system, Jacksonville, Fla. He managed development of the clinic's EHR more than 10 years ago, leading to the Stage 7 Award from HIMSS. Milov, a pediatric gastroenterologist, and his team developed innovations such as an Internet-based tool for patients' parents to securely access their children's medical records. His outside work includes research support to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to enhance the organization's quality measures.

Dr. Robert Murphy, 48, is chief medical informatics officer for eight-hospital Memorial Hermann Healthcare System, Houston. Murphy has continued to lead improvements to the clinical decision-support functions of the system's EHR to include increasingly complex clinical environments. That effort is credited with identifying and preventing 10,000 medical errors annually. An adjunct faculty member at the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas, Murphy also serves on a health IT technical working group of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Matt Murray, 53, is a clinical-care physician at the Brown-Lupton Health Center at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, holding HIMSS certification in health information and management systems. After enactment of the federal EHR incentive program in 2009, he moved from a position as a chief information officer for a large north Texas health system to a range of IT leadership roles in the state. He led the launch of the North Texas Regional Extension Center, Irving, as its chairman. It enrolled more than 1,500 physicians and was named a top REC nationally because of the high rate of its clinicians successfully attesting to meaningful use.

Ann O'Brien, 54, is national director of clinical informatics at 36-hospital Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, Calif. As a nurse informaticist, O'Brien spearheaded an effort to reduce Kaiser's hospital-acquired pressure ulcer rate through common EHR applications, among other steps. O'Brien also is leading Kaiser's initiative to transform care delivery through enabling technology, such as the development of clinical information dashboards. Her outside work has included participation on a Kaiser collaborative with the Veterans Affairs Department to develop a data capture, re-use and sharing model driven by nurses.

Dr. Ken Ong, 62, is chief medical informatics officer for 439-bed New York Hospital Queens, New York City. Ong is leading the hospital's EHR implementation, which has achieved Stage 1 of meaningful use and is working toward Stage 2. He helped develop care-coordination and patient-engagement tools for the New York eHealth Collaborative's New York Digital Health Accelerator. He has edited Medical Informatics: An Executive Primer, editions 1 and 2. Ong also is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Dr. Jonathan Perlin, 51, is chief medical officer at HCA, Nashville. Perlin developed the for-profit hospital chain's national EHR program, created a clinical data warehouse and developed a platform for clinical trials and health services research. That infrastructure is credited with helping HCA improve on CMS core measures and reducing hospital-acquired infection rates. Perlin is on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University as an adjunct professor of health administration and at Vanderbilt University as an adjunct professor of medicine and biomedical informatics.

Dr. Michael Shrift, 49, is chief medical information officer at Allina Health System, Minneapolis. His EHR implementation efforts include ensuring that 4,000 of the health system's nurses—all its hospital-based nurses—receive advance training on the system by the end of 2012. Shrift also led creation of a national CMIO collaborative. He lectures on clinical IT at the University of Minnesota and coaches CMIOs from other national integrated delivery networks, in addition to his own system's 10 EHR medical directors.

Dr. Julio Silva, 52, is chief medical information officer at 676-bed Rush University Medical Center, Chicago. In addition to overseeing the rollout of the hospital's EHR, Silva also managed its implementation at a community-affiliated hospital, 141-bed Rush Oak Park (Ill.) Hospital, and more than 60 medical practices. He led implementation of core measures dashboards to track compliance with required documentation components and oversaw the design of more than 300 custom templates for the hospital's EHR system to collect detailed data from specific programs.

Dr. John Trudel, 50, is a family practice physician at Reliant Medical Group, Worcester, Mass. Trudel developed an extensive array of tools for the group's EHR to improve clinical quality, reduce errors and boost usability. He co-authored a chapter in an upcoming book on the use of conditional logic in EHRs to balance choice, quality and efficiency. He also developed a range of best practice advisories' for his physician group and has focused on improving workflows for users.

Dr. Michael Zaroukian, 58, is chief medical information officer at four-hospital Sparrow Health System, Lansing, Mich. Zaroukian was medical director for the system's ambulatory EHR implementation project. He authored a 2006 study showing that the cost of EHR implementation per physician closely matched the payment rate used in the federal incentive program. He is also a professor in the department of medicine at Michigan State University, East Lansing.