H.I.T. Men & Women award celebrates health IT game changers

February 26, 2014

08:36 AM

The fifth annual H.I.T. Men & Women Awards Reception celebrated nine trailblazers in healthcare IT, people who through their vision, talent and perseverance are advancing the adoption of health IT, innovation and best practices to improve healthcare.

Three hundred guests attended this year’s reception, presented by Healthcare IT News and event founder emids.

Nine winners were honored; they were selected by the readers of Healthcare IT News who voted on a slate of 18 nominees.

The 2014 honorees in each category are:

Innovators, Up and Coming

Molly Coye, MD, Chief innovation officer, UCLA Health. Dr. Coye has worked toward telemedicine initiatives to reduce ER visits and hospital stays. She founded and served as CEO of the Health Technology Center, a nonprofit education and research organization. She co-founded and served as chair of the board of directors and CEO of CalRHIO, California's first statewide health information exchange organization.

Yan Chow, MD, Director Innovation & Advanced Technology Group, Kaiser Permanente Information Technology. Dr. Chow identifies, assesses, and makes recommendations on new and emerging clinical information technologies that will impact healthcare in the next two to five years. He also led experimental projects such as KP’s first PC interface for mainframes and created KP’s first networking forum for physicians.

Pamela Peele, Chief Analytics Officer, UPMC Health Plan. Peele brings 13 years of patient care experience along with 12 years of academic research experience to her position as the leader of healthcare analytics at the health plan. She is responsible for data analytic activities, economic modeling, predictive modeling, and statistical analysis.

The others who were nominated in this category:

Bryan Sivak, CTO, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Justin Kahn, CEO, TruClinic

Enhancing Patient Care through IT

Jessica Grosset, Vice Chair, IT Operations and Infrastructure, Mayo Clinic. Under Grosset’s leadership, Mayo Clinic went chartless in 2005 and filmless a year later. Mayo Clinic has seen savings of $40 million from automation of basic EHR functions. Grosset and her team’s efforts earned the clinic Stage 7 HIMSS EMRAM status.

Patricia Skarulis, VP/CIO, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Skarulis and her team oversee one of the nation's largest Web-based data warehouses, containing the clinical records of more than 1.25 million patients. Under Skarulis' leadership, the center was listed among the ‘Most Wired’ hospitals in the country.

Sumit Nagpal , President & CEO, Alere Accountable Care Solutions., Nagpal is one of the first people in the industry to realize the need for a true HIE – aggregating patient data across a community – he has revolutionized entire healthcare organizations: delivering clinical decision support and population analytics to healthcare providers and decision makers, enabling patients to take their own care into their own hands, improving outcomes and decreasing costs.

The other nominees in this category were.

Julie Vilardi, RN, Executive Director, Strategic Projects, Kaiser Permanente
Aurelia Boyer, Senior VP and CIO, New York Presbyterian Hospital
Daniel Barchi, SVP and CIO, Yale - New Haven Health System
Bill Bria, CMIO, Shriners Hospital for Children
Michael Warden, Senior VP of IT and CIO, Banner Health
Martha Thorne, VP and GM, Performance and Care Logistics, Allscripts

Shapers and Influencers

Andrew Watson, MD, Medical Director, UPMC's Center for Connected Medicine. Dr. Watson is a practicing surgeon and medical director of UPMC's Center for Connected Medicine and vice president of UPMC's telemedicine program. A 4^th-generation surgeon and the seventh in his family, Andrew is one of the leading forces in the advancement of mHealth in the clinical setting, and is a much sought-after speaker and panelist at mHealth conferences throughout the world.

Regina Holiday, Founder, Medical Advocacy Mural Project. Holiday is an artist who founded the Walking Gallery and the Medical Advocacy Mural Project. After losing her husband to cancer in 2009 – and struggling during his illness to get access to his medical records – she became an arts advocate for all patients’ rights to their own medical data.

Dave deBronkart, e-patient Dave. Dave deBronkart beat cancer and is actively engaged in opening healthcare information directly to patients, working to create a new dynamic in how information is delivered, accessed and used by the patient.

Other nominees in this category: