The 2012 Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards Program received well over 60 submissions from healthcare organizations across the U.S., including hospitals, medical groups, integrated health systems, health information exchanges, and public health departments. All were honorable and of interest, and many were exceptional. The HCI editorial team reviewed all the submissions, chose 15 semi-finalist submissions, and forwarded those to our distinguished panel of judges, who themselves were the leads or co-leads of past winning teams (see sidebar below for more information on this year's judges).

Because of the exceptionally high quality of all 15 semi-finalist submissions, the HCI editorial team plans to profile each of the semi-finalist teams during issues throughout the remainder of the year. Below are brief capsule descriptions of the 11 semi-finalist submissions, presented in alphabetical order by organization name. Please continue to turn to HCI’s monthly issues for longer articles on these admirable teams and their innovations. Congratulations to all the semi-finalists!

Allina Hospitals and Clinics (Minneapolis)
Leader: Susan Heichert, CIO
Project: Patient Census Dashboard
In 2011, leaders at Allina Hospitals and Clinics set out to build an application to help ensure that patients’ unique needs are matched with appropriate resources in order to help keep them healthy and out of the hospital. An interdisciplinary team from 10 hospitals worked to understand the barriers to coordinating care for patients with complex needs, with one of the outcomes being the Patient Census Dashboard, a business intelligence application developed internally to assess patients’ risk levels.

Eisenhower Medical Center (Rancho Mirage, Calif.)
Leaders: David Perez, CIO; Steven Arendt, M.D., CMIO
Project: Leading Change, Advancing Health: A Model to Transform Practice
Looking for a way to prevent ventilator-associated pneumonia and to better manage stroke care, leaders at this community hospital in Southern California deployed a clinical IT solution that uses embedded logic to analyze charting and orders and display adherence to the best practice standards of care.

Hospital for Special Surgery (New York City)
Leader: John Cox, CIO
Project: Reduction of Unnecessary Transfusions
Seeking to improve patient safety by reducing the risks of potentially unnecessary transfusions, as well as to conserve the precious resource of transfusion-dedicated blood, leaders at this specialized Manhattan hospital have been using a combination of strategies, including best-practice and evidence-based medicine tools, education of orders, electronically delivered risk assessments, alerts, and order sets, with significant success.

Phoenix Indian Medical Center (Ariz.)
Leaders: John Meeth, D.D.S., CIO; Anthony Dunnigan, M.D., Director of Medical Informatics
Project: EHR Implementation
Phoenix Indian Medical Center’s EHR implementation represents the largest EHR implementation in the Indian Health Service to date.

Texas Health Resources (Arlington)
Leader: Mary Beth Mitchell, Chief Nursing Information Officer
Project:  Nurse Champion EHR Optimization
Following a 13-hospital EHR implementation, Texas Health Resources’ CNIO determined that there was an opportunity to improve nursing workflows and nursing documentation. Accordingly, a team of “nurse champions” has  reorganized the patient admission history, optimized several key nurse workflows, and improved support to nurse end-users of the organization’s EHR.

Visiting Physicians Association, U.S. Medical Management (Troy, Mich.)
Leader: Michael Reed, CIO
Project:  Applying Technology to Mobile Medicine
The Visiting Physicians Association, an affiliate of U.S. Medical Management, brings high-quality patient care directly to the homebound elderly nationwide, using 170 doctors in 30 locations to serve about 50,000 patients a year. By rolling out an advanced mobile EHR solution, the organization has  enhanced the information available to physicians at the point of care, and improved ordering capabilities.

University Hospitals Cleveland (Ohio)
Leaders: Beverly Rosipko and Danielle Sines, PACS management
Project: PACS Integration
Leaders at University Hospitals, Cleveland, have been working assiduously to create system-wide connectivity in imaging informatics in order to provide their end-user physicians with a seamless, integrated experience with their PACS and RIS systems. They have developed access based on an EMR-based launch into PACS.

University of Missouri Health System (Columbia, Mo.)
Leader: Michael Heller, Software Architect
Project: Well Baby Nursery Automation/Paperless Rounding
Using the latest agile methodologies with an embedded team of software designers and engineers, developers at the University of Missouri Health Systems have created a dynamic, web-based dashboard called the WBN Multi-Patient List MPage, which is being used very successfully by clinicians doing rounding in the flagship hospital’s well baby nursery.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Leader: G. Daniel Martich, M.D., CMIO
Project: Online e-visits
The UPMC health system has made it possible for patients to participate in an innovative e-visits program, one in which they complete carefully designed questionnaires that provide medically relevant data to physicians through a secure online portal, allowing those patients to ask questions of their doctors in more than 20 different topic areas. Importantly, the UPMC staffers who designed the program incorporated a reimbursement model into the program using CPT code 99444 to allow for physician reimbursement through insurance.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Leader: Dan Drawbaugh, CIO
Project: Digital Pathology Consultation Portal
UPMC has internally developed a set of web-based tools to support digital pathology consultations and allow the digital viewing of whole slide images. The web-based program overcomes the challenges associated with the size of digital pathology studies and the lack of imaging standards.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Leader: Dan Drawbaugh, CIO
Project: Payer-Provider Clinical Information Integration
The UPMC health system, which has an affiliated health plan, has created an industry-first patient-centered clinical record that integrates both payer and provider data. The solution, implemented in the autumn of 2011, is being used to foster greater levels of insight into the patient’s complete longitudinal record. The combined record overcomes limits embedded in federal regulations that prohibit the co-storage of data from both provider and payer databases, through the use of an interoperability solution.