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It began over dinner at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. A doctor at Johns Hopkins Medical Center thought he had some good ideas about how to improve the center's vital patient electronic records system. He talked with a few other doctors at dinner, and soon, the group was meeting every week at the restaurant to flesh out their ideas.

At about that time, the new CIO for Johns Hopkins, Stephanie Reel, heard about this informal gathering, and saw an opportunity to form some collegial ties with an important constituency at the medical center. She also saw an opportunity to gain information about the records system from a group that used it regularly. So, she asked the doctors if she could come to dinner with them one evening -- actually, she hosted the dinner -- and suddenly, those meetings were transformed from a casual get-together for sharing ideas, to a working group with mutual goals about how to make health care delivery at Johns Hopkins more efficient, and of higher quality. Today, twelve years later, an even larger group of caregivers and IT staff still meet regularly each month for dinner to exchange ideas about how IT can partner with the other professionals at Johns Hopkins to further their mutual goals.

You can tell a lot about Reel's deft management style from this slice of professional life at one of the world's most prestigious medical and educational institutions. Stephanie Reel has been called a "consummate politician" by Ronald Peterson, president of the Johns Hopkins health system and hospital. That might reflect the reality of being a CIO serving the diverse needs and requirements of patients, researchers, medical personnel, and students. But Reel insists that it's really all about finding ways to communicate and work together, not playing politics.

"Our mutual goal is to provide excellent patient care," she says. "When everyone is focused on one common goal, working together becomes a lot easier." And that includes those early dinner meetings, which resulted in Johns Hopkins's cutting-edge electronic patient records system and earned the center praise from Computerworld magazine and the Smithsonian Institution. Proof again that amazing things can be accomplished with a little talking, a little listening, and a little pasta.

Resources

Who Made it Happen: Stephanie Reel, Vice Provost/Vice President and CIO, Johns Hopkins Medical Center and University

Bio, Johns Hopkins Medical Center and University

Bio

Stephanie L. Reel has been vice provost for information technology and chief information officer for The Johns Hopkins University since January 1999. She is also vice president for information services for Johns Hopkins Medicine, a post she has held since 1994. As CIO for all divisions of the Johns Hopkins University and Health System, Reel leads the implementation of the strategic plan and operational redesign for information services, networking, telecommunications, as well as, clinical, research and instructional technologies. Reel formed a governance structure to support funding and priority setting across both university and health system to meet the education and research needs of the enterprise.

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager
Scott Ebner, Web Developer