From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


So I was excited about that, and then my wife and I decided to move to Arizona. The reason that’s germane is that if you were doing informatics in the late 90s, the only place you could end up at that time, to my knowledge, was in academia. So we came to Phoenix, where there was no medical school at the time, and I ended up doing some consulting work with some colleagues. A large radiology practice in town found out about my skills and they wanted some help being able to extract data out of their combined RIS-billing solutions and run reports. I worked with them more and more, and they were looking to put in a RIS, PACS, and an IT network, and make the jump to digital imaging. Eventually I became their IT Director and then the CIO. After a number of years, one of the physicians told me about SIIM (at the time, they were called SCAR). I went to the Orlando meeting around 2005 and it was this magical moment. The culture was amazingly open and instantly I felt a connection to so many likeminded people.

HCB News: When you talked about your start with informatics and predictive healthcare, it brought to mind Google’s efforts around tracking and predicting the spread of illness using search term data. Are applications like that interesting to you?
JW: In 2012, I decided to try to branch off into new interests. I started a small company called Lumetis to get into some more analytics work and to do some consulting with that. While I did that, I was also recruited to chair the IT committee for a clinically integrated network now called Innovation Care Partners. It was a group coming together to contract for value-based care payment systems. It’s been very exciting because we have a lot of data from our systems that we can use to look at who might get sick and how we can prevent people from getting sick. For me, it’s been a golden era, where the technology, and the financial incentives are finally aligned.

HCB News: How did you get to where you are today in the society?
JW: The connections I made were so valuable, but I also wanted to give back to the group. I remember back in 2007, I had done work starting a GE PACS user group. I remember going up to Brad Erickson, who’s a giant in informatics. I told him I was at a private practice group in Arizona and we’re doing a lot of imaging informatics, but that it’s a little different from what he’s doing in the big integrated healthcare divisions. I added that I’d love a chance to talk about that sometime. I didn’t expect much to happen, but a few months later I got a call from someone in the SIIM program who asked me if I could put together three lectures or a track on what imaging informatics is doing in the imaging centers or private practice. It was a sign that the society is so flat that you could walk up to the most senior person and they’d listen to you. I was coming in as an internist and CIO, and brought a different perspective that people wanted to hear, so I got a chance to speak more. Later, I was asked to join the board. I kept showing up, I kept wanting to contribute.

May 2018 Magazine

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