Associate Professor, Informatics Director of Community and Family Medicine at University of Missouri – Kansas City
Unlike most physicians, I took a circuitous route to medical school and in 1984 matriculated at the age of 34 in the University of Kansas School of Medicine. After completing the Family Medicine residency at KUMed 1991, I was offered a faculty position in the Family Medicine department. Two years later was appointed the Executive Director of Information Technology where I managed computing services, telecommunications, telemedicine, the mail room, and print shop. In 1997 I was recruited by Cerner Corporation by Neal Patterson and acted as the Chief Medical Information Officer for Health Midwest until that hospital network was acquired by HCA. I continued on with Cerner as a Physician Executive and undertook several roles and projects including playing a key role in the design of the onsite Healthe Clinic. Like other Physician Executives, I was assigned to various national and international clients in the US, Canada, Malaysia, and UAE. I left Cerner in 2006 to help one of my clients, Heartland Health, convert to a digital environment and practiced out of the Innovation Clinic in Platte City until 2013 when I accepted a position in the Community and Family Practice Department at TMC Lakewood. I am an active member of the American Academy of Family Practice and was a member of the Academy’s ad hoc Committee on Electronic Medical Records and was asked to participate in the Academy’s Rebooting Primary Care workshop at the NLM in Bethesda, Maryland. In addition to the AAFP, I am also active in a number of professional organizations and was the past president for the Heart of America chapter of HIMSS and continue to be a Medical Director for CVS Minute Clinics in the Kansas City area. I have aggressively utilized the patient portal, telemedicine, promoted point of care imaging, and believe that until the patient is the primary user of the EHR we will not fully realize the power of the clinical information systems in which we are now investing. I also continue to provide medical content expertise to a number of startup companies in the greater Kansas City area and am looking forward to helping Truman Medical Centers lead in providing low cost, high value health care to the Kansas City area both within and outside the four walls of our campus.
