50 Top Healthcare IT Experts, Part 2

50 Top Healthcare IT Experts, Part 2

Healthcare IT is blessed with many knowledgeable experts willing to share what they know with others. Narrowing that list down to 50 was a significant challenge. On Monday, Health Data Management offered a compilation of the first 25 of these guiding lights in the industry; today we offer the remaining 25. Some have worked to advance the industry for nearly half a century, while others are newer voices who have taken on the industry’s new challenges. All are worthy of mention as a sample of those who are advancing the important work of healthcare IT. (Image: iStock)

Steven Lazarus

President, Boundary Information Group

Lazarus is a long-timer, having seen the vast changes in healthcare IT spanning almost four decades. His consultancy team specializes in strategic planning, vendor selection/contract negotiations and hospital/ambulatory EHR implementations.

Charles Macias, MD

Chief Clinical Systems Integration Officer, Texas Children's Hospital

Utilizing near real-time visualization platforms to view daily updated dashboards, Macias led an effort to access and analyze population data to support rapid cycle process improvement strategies. His team has been able to drive decreases in chest X-ray utilization (from 72% of cases down to less than 28%), as well as improved evidence-based order set utilization, and decreased length of stay for patients with asthma.

Pamela McNutt

CIO, Methodist Health System

McNutt has played a leading role in understanding federal regulations affecting health information technology and the nation’s providers. She has been active in policy committees for the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and often quoted for her quick insights on the nuances of how regulations will affect healthcare IT.

Farzad Mostashari, MD

Co-founder and CEO, Aledade

Mostashari has spent his career at the forefront of health care policy and health information technology. He is a former National Coordinator for Health IT at HHS and served as a distinguished expert at the Brookings Institute’s Engelberg Center for HealthCare Reform. He has spoken and written extensively on issues affecting health IT, Accountable Care Organizations, and health care policy and delivery.

Michael Mytych

President & Founder, Health Information Consulting LLC

Mytych is another top vendor selection consultant, considerably softer around the edges than Vince Ciotti, but also bringing institutional knowledge and results to the table.

Kris O’Shea

Vice President of Nursing Practice and Clinical Informatics, WellSpan Health

O’Shea serves as the clinical leader for the design, planning, implementation and optimization of the electronic health record, clinical information systems, and the transformation of clinical processes across the health system. Her system-wide successes include clinical documentation, medication bar-code scanning, IV pump auto-programming/infusion management, device integration, interdisciplinary plans of care (IPOC) and CPOE.

Deborah Peel, MD

Founder, Patient Privacy Rights

The organization’s mission is to restore patient control over personal health information. Peel is an often-quoted and well-respected spokeswoman for privacy of patient information and risks that need to be addressed in the wide use of healthcare information technology.

Meredith Phillips

Chief Information Privacy and Security Officer, Henry Ford Health System

At Phillips' behest, Henry Ford was the first provider organization to sign on to the Medical Identity Fraud Alliance to prevent medical ID theft. To do so, she streamlined efforts around verification processes, trained staff to pay attention to body language and provided other guidance during an enterprise-wide EHR installation.

Marc Probst

Vice President and CIO, Intermountain HealthCare

Probst has been a leader in Information Technology and Healthcare services for the past 20 years. Before coming to Intermountain, Probst was a partner with Deloitte Consulting and has served as the CIO for a large third-party administrator. He also has served on federal advisory panels addressing health IT issues.

Stephanie Reel

CIO and Vice Provost, Johns Hopkins University

Reel is CIO and Vice Provost for Information Technology for the Johns Hopkins University, and Vice President for Information Services for Johns Hopkins Medicine. She leads implementation of the strategic plan and operational redesign for information services, networking, and telecommunications, as well as clinical, research, and instructional technologies.

Mark Rheault

Director of Enterprise Visibility, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Rheault led an effort to deploy more than 5,000 infrared sensors and 800 receivers across 4 million square feet of Wake Forest Baptist facilities. The system has tagged 13,000 pieces of medical equipment and has sensors in 800 refrigerated units to monitor temperatures every five minutes. Wake Forest Baptist has issued 2,600 staff badges, and plans to issue another 8,000 staff badges and 2,000 patient tags.

Sue Schade

CIO, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers

Schade has worked in the health IT industry for 30 years, serving as a CIO for roughly half of those. Prior to joining University of Michigan in 2012, she spent 12 years as CIO at Boston's Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospitals. U-M Health System has reached Stage 6 on the HIMSS Analytics EMRAM scale of EHR adoption. Schade also helped B&W achieve Stage 6 during her tenure there.

John Showalter, MD

Chief Health Information Officer, University of Mississippi Medical Center

Showalter led work to adopt clinical predictive analytics that churn through standardized and “dirty” EHR data to provide real-time predictions on heart attack risks for UMMC’s patient population. Using predictive analytics, he has been able to take the entire population of patients and narrow it to a target group of only 1.5% of all patients. Within that 1.5%, 75 out of each 100 patients are predicted to have a heart attack.

Rasu Shrestha, MD

Chief Innovation Officer, UPMC (Pittsburgh)

Shrestha, trained as a radiologist, has been a key architect of an innovative unified approach to image viewing across 20 UPMC hospitals and 30 imaging centers. He also serves as the executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC, and leads a team of over 200 technology professionals.

Dean Sittig, PhD

Professor, University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics

Sittig is a specialist on the safety of electronic health records and other types of HIT.

Pat Skarulis

Senior Vice President of Information Systems and CIO, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Before joining MSKCC as CIO in 2002, Skarulis served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. She also served as an Assistant Professor in the Rush University master's degree program in Health Systems Management.

Bill Spooner

Former CIO, Sharp Healthcare

Spooner retired from his role in 2014 as leader of Sharp HealthCare’s IT team. He worked for Sharp since 1978, moving to the IT side in the mid-1980s. But he’s not completely retired, still serving as a consultant and industry expert of key topics within healthcare IT.

Terri Steinberg, MD

Chief Medical Information Officer, Christiana Care Health System

Steinberg led design of a massive population health initiative that has recreated treatment strategies for more than 20 chronic disease states. Christiana Care now is taking population health a step further and analyzing the health status of all Delaware residents, whether by Christiana or not, via data feeds from a statewide health information network.

Paul Tang, MD

Vice President and CMIO, Palo Alto Medical Foundation

Under Tang’s direction, Palo Alto’s more than 900 physicians helped develop the MyChart patient portal that’s now part of the Epic EHR system. He is vice chair of the federal Health Information Technology Policy Committee, and chair of its Meaningful Use workgroup. He is a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and co-chairs its Quality Subcommittee. Tang is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and chaired an IOM patient safety committee.

William Tierney

President and CEO, Regenstrief Institute

Tierney is President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, an influential informatics and healthcare research firm. He is a professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and serves as associate dean for clinical effectiveness research. Recently, a posting by the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin announced that Tierney in January 2016 will join as chair of the department of population health and a professor.

Eric Topol, MD

Professor of Genomics, Scripps Health

Topol is professor of genomics and holds the Scripps endowed chair in innovative medicine. He is director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Topol is a well-known author as well, having written “The Creative Destruction of Medicine” and “The Patient Will See You Now.” He also is a practicing cardiologist.

Micky Tripathi

President and CEO, Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative

Tripathi is well-known for playing a leadership role in working to achieve interoperability within the healthcare industry. His activities range from policy guidance at the federal level, to collaborative strategic planning at the state and community levels, to implementation of health IT systems at the frontline of healthcare delivery.

Ferdinand Velasco, MD

Vice President and CHIO, Texas Health Resources

Velasco now serves as chief health information officer at Texas Health Resources. He served for 10 years as the chain’s chief medical information officer, and is widely respected for his ability to interact with peers, and blend outcomes research and medical informatics.

Greg Wolverton

CIO, ARCare/KentuckyCare

Under Wolverton's leadership, ARCare, a 37-clinic network spread across Arkansas and parts of Kentucky, became the first federally qualified health center to achieve Ambulatory Stage 7 in the HIMSS Analytics EHR adoption model.

Michael Zaroukian, MD

CIO, Sparrow Health

Zaroukian has held key IT leadership positions for the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians, and is now leading use of the EHR to transform care at Sparrow Health, a delivery system in central Michigan affiliated with Michigan State University and the Mayo Clinic. He also serves on the AMA's advisory committee on physician EHR usability.