One of my favorite ex-colleagues Phil Chuang got a nice bit of recognition last week being named as one of the ComputerWorld Top 100 CIOs for 2008. Note that this isn’t just health care CIOs, it’s among all CIOs!
Also note his quote about what his team did right
Making an aggressive go-live for an enterprise health care system in 100 days, 15% under budget — and still having everyone on the team like each other after the project.
Phil is very sharp and sensible, but always calm and good humored under pressure. We were working together in a not-too-calm start-up in 2000–2, and Phil’s team built a PHR which is still as good as many if not most on the market today—spending way way less money than most competitors.
He also kept a big score card on his cube wall on which he recorded how nasty I was being to the interns, who sat in the cubes next to us. For example if I bought cookies the score went down. After one particularly maladroit comment from me he had to add more paper above his cube to track my “nasty” quotient. Don’t worry, that intern still loves me and is inviting me over to dinner with her and her husband next week.
In any event, expect Phil to be a big star in health care IT in the future.
Re: Personal Health Records.
In Scandinavia all personal medical records, available over the Internet, are de-personalized. That is, the record has no name, no social security number, no address etc. Only certain identifiers known only to the owner of the record. This means that it is no way that a medical record can be tied to a specific person.
It is a totally safe system.
In the U.S. the http://www.HealthRecordRegistry.com has adopted these rules to the American market.It should be widely adopted.