IT Leadership Award Honoree Jay Brown

Editor's Note: The IT Leadership Awards, presented by Pride Technologies, celebrate local IT professionals who help local, regional, national and global businesses run better through engaged leadership and a commitment to innovation. For the next 9 weeks, check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we highlight one of the 20 honorees of this year's award.

IT isn’t always a matter of life and death, but for UC Health, the region’s level one trauma facility, it can be. Jay Brown, senior vice president and CIO for UC Health knows that technology can make a difference in more ways than one.

“What’s unique about UC Health is that we’re an academic medical center, so facilitating research and teaching the next generation of physicians, nurse, and pharmacists are a big part of our mission,” he says. “If we have our act together on the IT front, we become a more attractive place to host clinical trials for research, putting us at the forefront of medicine.”

Brown and his team do everything they can to be on the cutting edge of technology to give physicians and patients every IT-based advance possible.

Though electronic medical records (EMRs) are now in use across the country, it wasn’t too long ago that these were first implemented and they are still constantly improving.

“EMRs are a huge improvement and the right way to go,” Brown says. “Now if you want to figure out how fast medications get to patients, for example, you can just run a report.  The data that was buried in stacks of paper charts are now digitally available for analysis to improve patient care.”

His team implemented EPIC, the system he says every hospital in the city uses as a basis for electronic records, back in July 2012. He is very happy with the progress, noting that it’s a “great product that continues to grow with our organization.”

Moving forward, his team is focusing on business intelligence, by building a data warehouse and adapting end-user analytical tools. 

And as much as he embraces technology, Brown knows it isn’t everything. “It’s a very powerful tool to improve patient care in our business, but it’s only one of several components of how care is delivered,” he says. “There’s always the people factor. The people side is often what matters most to patients.”

Previous honorees featured: John Kellington, CIO and Senior VP, The Cincinnati Insurance Companies; Vinit Kohli, Vice President of Management Information Systems for Sibcy Cline; Anup Nair, Chief Information Officer of Vantiv; Nelson Vincent, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer for UC Information Technologies