Who: Dr. Julio Silva, 53
Previous position: Vice president of clinical systems and chief medical information officer at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, where he also helped lead the formation and launch in December of MetroChicago HIE, a 34-hospital regional health information exchange organization.
Moving to: Doha, Qatar, where he will become chief of health informatics at the Sidra Medical and Research Center for women and children that is now under construction and set to open in early 2015.
Key responsibilities: Will oversee the development and implementation of the new hospital's lifetime, longitudinal electronic health-record system that will track a patient's health records both in the hospital and out.
Why the change? “It's an opportunity to be part of a team that's building an organization from the ground up,” Silva said in a phone interview from Doha, where he arrived Jan. 10. “It's the actual bricks and mortar, but it's also being part of the team that is going to be developing an EHR and tools that are fully integrated and support the patient-care encounter.” The goal, he said, is a system “that will allow us to capture the data in real time, to provide the analytics in real time and feed that back to the physicians to have true decision support. That really hasn't been done before. How often do you get to be a part of that?”
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