John Glaser, PhD, senior vice president of client administration at Cerner, has had a prolific career. For more than 30 years, Dr. Glaser has overseen IT initiatives in the public and private sector, holding positions on both the vendor and provider sides.
Dr. Glaser earned his PhD in healthcare information systems from the University of Minnesota. He has served as a senior advisor to the ONC and is a fellow and founding chair of College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. He also is the past-president of HIMSS and a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.
In addition to these positions, Dr. Glaser previously served as vice president of information systems at Brigham and Women's Hospital and vice president and CIO of Partners HealthCare, both based in Boston. Dr. Glaser was also CEO of Siemens Health Services until February 2015 when it was acquired by Cerner.
tThroughout his career, Dr. Glaser has published more than 150 articles on health IT, many of which have been compiled into a book called "Glaser on Health Care IT: Perspectives from the Decade that Defined Health Care Information Technology."
The book, which will be available March 1, is a collection of some of Dr. Glaser's articles written for Hospitals & Health Networks.
Here, Dr. Glaser discusses the inspiration behind the book, the progress of health IT and how to get where the industry wants and needs to go.
Editor's note: Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What was the driving force behind writing this book and compiling your articles in one place?
Dr. John Glaser: I've always liked writing. I've written a couple of books, including some kids books. I've always enjoyed writing these columns. It forces you to [start] some thinking, it makes you write about something. I'm going to take my thought process and I'm going to put it on paper. I've always enjoyed that as a thought exercise.
Over the years, they [articles] accumulate. One thing I thought about is maybe it would be kind of interesting to put 10 years of these columns together. About every three or four years I like to do a book, and this was sort of on time for that. Also, it has been an amazing decade, with meaningful use, new types of technology and changes in payment methods.
Q: The book's subtitle is "Perspectives from the Decade that Defined Health Care Information Technology." What are some of the key events from this decade, 2005 to 2015, that were so defining?
JG: In 10 years, there have been a very small number of events. The HITECH legislation was the event. But by and large, you take these certain themes. In those themes you can see lots of progress. It's not necessarily an event, but if you look 10 years ago and say 'Where were we with adoption compared 10 years ago,' a lot has gone on.
We can look at three themes. The first is the theme of adoption or of technological innovation. The second is population health management and categories of analytics. Third is the management and wherewithal and know-how of how to do this, which is much higher, much more sophisticated, more competent than previosly. Implementation still goes sideways from time to time, but it's less of an issue now than it was 10 years ago.
Q: Looking back over some of the earlier columns, were there observations or conclusions you made that played out as you expected? Are there ones that ended up totally different?
JG: If I look at some of the earlier ones, there were questions of how to use IT in a competitive way. What played out: we're still using it to be competitive, and we're still worried about the effect of IT. But, the way we think about it is different. What I didn't really appreciate 10 years ago was how much change you could make.
The basic idea of competitiveness is still there, but the approaches are different and much more sophisticated than I would have thought. When I look back, a lot of the core ideas in the thoughts were correct; it's just how they played out. Sometimes it was slower or more innovative than I would have thought.
Q: Over your 30 year career, you've worked on the provider side and vendor side. Having perspective from both sides of the aisle, how do all industry stakeholders need to work more closely together to achieve the desired care outcomes?
JG: If we're going to really move the needle on healthcare, it's because it will be a multistakeholder undertaking. We must be able to get together, put differences aside and come to a common objective. That's really hard to do, but it's really necessary.
I find, and particularly in my time as a provider, it's more commonalities than differences. Everybody's in healthcare for a reason — they believe in the mission; they believe in healing. There are different ways to go on the path, but they believe it. They all grapple with how complicated this industry is to change. We all have an appreciation for the complexity of healthcare.
At the end of the day, there needs to be a common settling in on a mission and a belief in healthcare and a common understanding that it will take the multistakeholder approach to get to the final state.
More articles on health IT:
IBM to acquire Truven Health Analytics for $2.6B
What hospitals can learn from Hollywood Presbyterian's ransomware run-in
20 hospitals, health systems seeking Cerner, MEDITECH, Epic talent