I have a couple of “Life is Good” t-shirts, one with a runner and one with a water skier. Life has been particularly good as I reached my 50th birthday and served as HIMSS Chair for the Annual Conference this year. We are creating the health information highway and I recognize there are so many […]
Filling In The Gaps
Acknowledging Our Mentors: Scott MacLean’s Baggage Check
In the early years of Partners HealthCare’s IS Department, John Glaser and Mary Finlay periodically invited 25 staff members to dinner at our corporate headquarters on the 11th floor of the Prudential Center in Boston. When I was invited in the fall of 1998, nine others rsvp’d and six of us showed up. Unfortunately, Mary Finlay […]
The iOS6 Blues
As CIOs, we need reliability and, in addition to EHR uptime, email is perhaps the platform that affects our credibility the most. Many of us are enjoying the explosion of intuitive and helpful consumer devices and applications. I like that my Garmin GPS watch can upload my runs to Endomondo, which automatically syncs with the […]
Movin’ To Cubeville
I had the nicest office I’ve ever had. It had big windows overlooking Boston Harbor and the city skyline. Earlier this summer, I watched “Old Ironsides,” the USS Constitution, make its bi-annual turn-around in the harbor. I didn’t spend much time sitting there looking out the window, but it was very nice. Two months ago, […]
Healthcare Is Local, But The Problems Are The Same
I woke up at 3:30 this morning because I slept half the day yesterday after arriving on a red-eye from HIMSS12 in Las Vegas. We were thrilled that the Annual Conference had record-breaking numbers of attendees and exhibitors. It was a fabulous week of learning and catching up with friends, and I was ready to […]
When a Top Performer Leaves, Channel Jack Welch
In early January, I received this email from one of our top project managers who had a baby in November: “I hope you had a great Christmas and a happy new year! I was hoping to catch up with you for a few minutes when you have time over the next few days. If you could give me a call when you have some time to chat, I would appreciate it.”
When All Else Fails, Have a Hissy Fit
A few weeks ago, I had a hissy fit at our IS Steering Committee. I didn’t quite break down into a childish tantrum, but I was visibly upset when the Committee failed to make a decision on whether to squeeze in a few projects before our EMR vendor becomes certified for Meaningful Use. They “didn’t […]
Leaving John Glaser
In the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage stars as Ben Sanderson, a Hollywood screenwriter who’s lost everything and moves to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. I’m not going to set out to drink myself to death because John is leaving Partners, but as one of my colleagues said, “It’s a big deal, John. This marks the end of an era.”
Several Habits of an Effective CIO
Lots of ink has been spent on the increasing complexity of the CIO role and the new attributes needed to be successful in the job. Similar amounts have been dedicated to how to cope with these demands. Perhaps it’s presumptuous to consider my habits effective, but these have been the core planning categories that have […]