From trauma triage to IT

When riots erupted in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, 1992, and ambulances began screaming into nearby emergency rooms, one of the physicians who responded was Dr. John Halamka, now CIO of Harvard Medical School and a keynote speaker at our SOA Executive Forum next month.

During those four fateful days, some 60 people were killed and hundreds more wounded — many of whom were treated at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where Dr. Halamka was a young resident. Although he doesn’t remember the exact sequence of events, Dr. Halamka does recall working nonstop, without food or water, for 36 hours before feeling a sharp pain in his back. Dehydration had caused a painful kidney stone to form in his urinary tract.

“If anything trains you to be a CIO, it’s being an emergency-care doctor during a riot,” Dr. Halamka jokes. “The triage and minute-by-minute decisions you need to run a large IT organization are easy compared to dealing with burns, stabbings, and gunshot wounds.”

As CIO of the school and associated hospitals, Dr. Halamka is responsible for information systems that help 30,000 health-care workers treat 2 million patients per year. He also helped spearhead MA-Share, an SOA (service-oriented architecture) project that ties together financial and clinical data from hospitals statewide to help administrators, providers, and patients.

Say a 65-year-old patient walks in complaining of chest pain. “Perhaps this patient isn’t totally forthcoming about all the types of activity that cause the pain,” Dr. Halamka says, “some of which involve Viagra.”

A physician might prescribe nitroglycerin. Fortunately, the SOA-based system will show that the patient is using Viagra — which, if combined with nitroglycerin, can lead to a potentially fatal loss of blood pressure. “We’ve wrapped middleware around all the major pharmacy benefit managers serving the Northeast so we can execute a secure, just-in-time query,” Dr. Halamka explains. And even if the physician fails to spot the potential conflict between the drugs, the MA-Share system will warn him when he tries to write a nitroglycerin prescription using the standard, Web-based online order-entry form that is another element of the SOA-based solution.

Dr. Halamka will be describing the MA-Share system, including its achievements and its growing pains, at InfoWorld’s SOA Executive Forum in New York on May 17 — to register, visit soaexecutiveforum.com. That’s just one of the many informative case studies covered at the meeting — and its West Coast companion to be held in San Jose, Calif., on May 5. We hope you will join us.