Spooner Named CIO of the Year

Bill Spooner, senior vice president and CIO at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, is the recipient of the 2009 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year Award.


Bill Spooner, senior vice president and CIO at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego, is the recipient of the 2009 John E. Gall Jr. CIO of the Year Award.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, and Health Information Management and Systems Society jointly sponsor the award. Spooner will be honored during a banquet at the annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, March 1-4 in Atlanta.

The award is named for John E. Gall Jr., who pioneered implementation of the first fully integrated medical information system at California's El Camino Hospital in the 1960s. Gall passed away in October 2001.

Spooner started at Sharp HealthCare in 1981 and has served as CIO for 13 years. He served as chair of the CHIME board in 2006 and chaired the CHIME Foundation board in 2007. He also is active in the local HIMSS chapter and is a member of the California Hospital Association Health Informatics and Technology Committee. He currently is leading Sharp's initiative to implement computerized physician order entry systems.

Past CIOs of the Year since the award started in 1989 are: John E. Gall Jr., Ward Keever, Larry Grandia, Richard Duncan, John Glaser, William Reed, Sam Schultz II, Walter Menning, James Wagner, Wei-Tih Cheng, Stephanie Reel, Charles Emery Jr., Richard Skinner, Pamela McNutt, Timothy Zoph, Gregory Walton, Timothy Stettheimer, Eric Yoblonka, George Hickman and Patricia Skarulis.

--Joseph Goedert