The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives awarded Omer Awan, senior vice president and CIO of Macon, Ga.-based Navicent Health, its 2018 transformational leadership award.
Each year, CHIME presents the transformational leadership award in conjunction with the American Hospital Association. The award honors a CEO or CIO whose organization "developed and deployed transformational IT that improved the delivery of care and streamlined administrative services," according to CHIME.
Navicent Health's leadership credited Mr. Awan with embedding the hospital's IT staff within other departments, to make technology a foundational and supportive part of the organization's problem-solving process. One of the hospital's recent IT successes was the rollout of a real-time care coordination platform that shortened scheduling times and decreased scheduling errors.
"IT has broken out of the shell of technology … It is in business; it is in the clinical areas," Mr. Awan said. "All of my IT managers and directors rewrote their job descriptions. They are not just managers and directors, they are solution partners."
Ninfa Saunders, president and CEO of Navicent Health, added, "Today, IT is considered a strategic asset and looked upon as an innovative and customer-oriented group that is consistently raising the bar for gold-standard customer service … Omer has fostered the spirit of innovation within the IT team and the organization as a whole."