Hackensack University Medical Center (HackensackUMC) is at the forefront of adopting technology solutions aimed at arming clinicians and patients with information that can help them make better decisions, as well as reduce healthcare costs. For his work spearheading many of these efforts, Shafiq Rab, M.D., vice president and chief information officer at HackensackUMC, was awarded the College of Healthcare Information Management Executive’s (CHIME) 2015 Innovator of the Year Award. Rab accepted the award at the CHIME15 Fall CIO Forum.

“I am humbled and honored by this honor,” Rab said. “It is a great recognition of the accomplishments of my team at Hackensack University Medical Center, as well as our partnership with outside partners and vendors.”

HackensackUMC is one of the first health systems in the nation to link patient-generated data from personal fitness devices and mobile apps to its electronic medical record, enabling clinicians to have a more complete view of a patient’s history.

HackensackUMC also teamed with Infor to develop and implement open, vendor-neutral standards as part of the Argonaut Project. Launched in 2014, the Argonaut Project is a national effort geared around speeding up adoption of HL7’s standards framework, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).

“Achieving interoperability is one of the industry’s biggest challenges and priorities,” said CHIME President and CEO Russell Branzell, FCHIME, CHCIO. “Through Shafiq’s efforts, we are seeing how greater connectivity between providers and patients can create more efficient and effective care delivery.”

Rab added that efforts like FHIR will help promote better data exchange and such efforts as President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative.

“Our collective actions have significantly improved access to health data by the patient, while at the same time improving patient satisfaction,” he said.

Also with an eye toward creating a more efficient delivery system, Rab and his team worked with Vital Images to improve access to digital images. The imaging system at HackensackUMC makes images more readily available to physicians and patients.

“We worked with several great partners to develop our universal imaging strategy to make images available to both patients and clinicians at clinically relevant and meaningful moments in context of the problem, disease or encounter during the entire life of that patient,” Rab said. “The information needs to be easily accessible, presented in a meaningful way and understandable.”

Learn more about the CHIME Innovator of the Year Award,

About CHIME
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 1,700 CIO members and over 150 healthcare IT vendors and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and healthcare in the communities they serve.