Published: June 18, 2012
Sparrow's Chief Medical Information Officer will be part of a prestigious White House panel Tuesday, June 19, on the challenges and opportunities of expanding information technology in health care.
Dr. Michael Zaroukian, MD, PhD is a nationally renowned expert in health information technology and was invited to participate based on his leadership in the field. Dr. Zaroukian is a Sparrow Vice President and is providing clinical informatics leadership to Sparrow's adoption of an Electronic Medical Record system (iSparrow EMR) that is already facilitating quality, safety and active Patient participation in the care process.
The White House panel includes leading health care providers and top administration officials discussing how best to leverage health IT to improve patient care quality and value. "I hope that by sharing my experiences with EMR implementation and optimization I can help inspire other physicians to embark on this challenging but worthy care transformation journey," Dr. Zaroukian said.
"I am excited the administration is giving us a forum to listen to each other and work together because it will be key to developing the policies our nation needs to fix a broken healthcare system that is too costly and too inconsistent in the delivery of high quality care to every patient, every time."
Dr. Zaroukian recently worked with the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to produce a video on adopting EHR in physician practices and health care systems. As chair of the American College of Physicians Medical Informatics Committee, he also made recommendations to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on implementing a new health care coding/reference system for physicians nationwide.
In addition to his position with Sparrow, Dr. Zaroukian serves as a professor of Medicine where he previously served as the MSU HealthTeam's and Chief Medical Information Officer at Michigan State University where he directed the university's enterprise-wide EMR implementation. He is also a member of the AMA Health Information Technology Advisory Group, and is chair of the Health Information Management and Systems Society Ambulatory Information Systems Committee.
"We are excited to have Dr. Zaroukian recognized nationally for his expertise in leading-edge healthcare transformation. His voice at the national table speaks to what we've been doing here at Sparrow and through our relationship with MSU," said Joe Ruth, Sparrow's Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.