John Glaser, CIO at Partners Healthcare, has helped his organization prepare for the future of health care and information technology.
By Mary Kelly
John Glaser has seen a lot in his years as CIO at Partners HealthCare and in previous IT positions. But he's still surprised by the complexity of using IT to transform organizational processes.
“It’s politically hard,” he says. “Change management is hard. The technology is hard. It’s a long, expensive, challenging thing to do.”
At Partners HealthCare, Glaser manages a staff of 1,300 employees and an annual budget of $210 million. Previously, he was vice president of information systems at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He also is the founding chairman of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and past president of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
In 2007, Glaser was named to the CIO Hall of Fame in CIO Magazine, the Top 100 Most Influential CIOs in CIO Insight magazine, and CIO of the Year by the Massachusetts Network Communications Council.
Because of his vast technology and healthcare experience, Glaser was able to create an organization with exceptional technical competency, despite the challenges inherent to new technology implementations.
“This organizational competency will outlast me and any incumbents,” he says.
He attributes this competence to a talented team that works well together, the organization's change management experience, and a combination of focus and stamina. The latter are especially important, he says, because transforming an organization typically does not take just several weeks or months, but years.
Twelve years ago, Partners HealthCare founded what is now known as the Center for Connected Health, which is a forward–looking workgroup to explore delivering care over distance and time. Six years ago, the Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics was launched to explore the role of genetics and genomics in esearch and clinical medicine. Today, Partners HealthCare is launching a third function to explore regional health information exchange.
In each case, Partners HealthCare wasn't able to specify what technology, business model or specific objectives would be mapped to these initiatives. However, the organization's leadership recognized that each of these initiatives would become an important contributor in the future and that the organization needed to create competencies in these areas. With these objectives in mind, they successfully created an environment for people to experiment and learn through trial and error. Through these experiments, people could see what the next generation of health care would look like and what the organization would need to do to prepare for it.
From this experience, Glaser learned that organization leaders should hesitate before making significant investments in IT, unless the organization has been able to provide detailed mapping from strategic objectives to the IT initiative. However, he admits to occasions where violating this rule is crucial so that organizations can explore emerging issues that will have an impact on the entire organization.
“Organizations need to be very thoughtful about technology on the cutting edge,” he says, “and they need to recognize when to avoid it.”