Chief Medical Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente
John began his medical career at UC San Diego and Scripps Clinic, where he practiced in many clinical settings including primary care, critical care, preventive medicine, hyperbaric medicine, trauma and helicopter medicine, and held several directorships while at Scripps Clinic, including Quality, Utilization, and Critical Care. He joined Kaiser Permanente in 1989, and was appointed as Assistant Medical Director and Chief Medical Information Officer in 1992.
John’s interest in systems design began as a marine biologist when he created several software applications to model population behavior. He wrote his first electronic health record in 1984 and used fully automated medical records in his practice until the time he began a fulltime commitment to healthcare informatics. He has built, designed, or implemented seven different EHR systems, most recently KP HealthConnect. His team helped build and deploy the first highly scalable version of this system, which today stands as the largest private sector implementation of an EHR in the US. John was director of the largest regional deployment, encompassing 5,000 physicians, 140 clinics, 13 hospitals, and 2.3million members, but he is quick to identify his many colleagues within KP who have provided the support, the resources and the skills necessary for such a monumental achievement.
He has actively shaped a culture of extremely rapid issue escalation and resolution that became the single most critical success factor for this large scale and pioneering project. He was also one of the founding members of the IMIA Workgroup on Organizational Aspects of Informatics, which focuses on the cultural change management required to successfully transform cultures with new technology. His team included many world class project managers who completed the project more than a year ahead of schedule and nearly $100million under budget. KP has been recognized as the uncontested leader for both outpatient and inpatient systems, leading the country for hospitals awarded with the top HIMSS level 7 designation. In 2011, 6 of the hospitals in SCAL region, and 12 KP hospitals nationally were recognized among the top 118 “Most Connected Hospitals” by US News and World Report. KPHC also includes the largest and most active use of Personal Health Records (PHRs) in the nation. With over 60% of our eligible members using the PHR portal, we exchange over 25,000 secure emails daily with our patients. Whether it’s US News & World Report, JD Powers, or National Council on Quality Assurance, Kaiser Permanente tops nearly every third party assessment for quality of care.
John has co-chaired the National KP IT Infrastructure Governance for the past four years, and he also chaired the Inter-Regional Business Governance Group since its inception. In addition, he chairs the national governance oversight of Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Data Center Strategy. He continues his active participation on National HIT Strategy, Security Council, Care Delivery, and Risk Management.
