Main description:

In his highly regarded blog, Life as a Healthcare CIO, John Halamka records his experiences with health IT leadership, infrastructure, applications, policies, management, governance, and standardization of data. But he also muses on topics such as reducing our carbon footprint, sustainable farming, mountain climbing, being a husband, father and son, and living life to its fullest. During his remarkable career, beginning when he ran a 35-person company that specialized in business process automation while he was an undergraduate at Stanford and a medical student at UCSF, to his current positions at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Halamka has demonstrated a unique blend of technical, clinical, and leadership knowledge and skills. Under his leadership, BIDMC has had many successes in health IT: first hospital in the country to attest to Meaningful Use, early personal health record adoption, innovation in the use of web-based provider order entry, rapid adoption of iPads, and one of the first vendor-neutral image archives. As Aneesh Chopra, former US Chief Technology Officer, writes in the Foreword of this book, "John Halamka is among the few health IT leaders with success in three sectors of our economy-public, private, and academic. No matter the role you find yourself playing in the industry, you will surely find inspiration in John Halamka's words."