HFMA Virtual Roundtable – Speaker Q&A – for Rebecca G. Mishuris, MD, MS, MPH, Chief Medical Information Officer, Boston Medical Center Health System located in Boston, MA
- Tell us about your career journey – My first introduction to health IT was at the dinner table as a child – my mother an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, my father the Chief Technology Officer of a large business and strategy IT consulting firm. As a rebellious teenager I swore I wouldn’t grow up to be like them – so much for that. As an MIT undergraduate I worked with a non-profit called Project HEALTH (now Health Leads) to establish a chapter at MIT. With the MIT Media Lab we developed a touch screen kiosk outside the BMC Pediatrics Clinic to display a website with SDOH resources around the city – this allowed parents to access this information without having to disclose their needs in front of their child. After graduation I worked for a business and strategy IT consulting firm in their Public Sector division, helping hospitals harness big data to identify emerging infectious disease outbreaks and helping the consulting company find a strategy for growth internally. I realized through that journey that I wanted to be the physician on the other side of the table. I completed medical school at Boston University, and stayed at Boston Medical Center for a residency in Internal Medicine and as a Chief Resident. I completed an MPH at Harvard and a General Internal Medicine fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where my research focused on the impact of health IT on care delivery – cost, quality and outcomes. I returned to Boston Medical Center to assist with the implementation of a new EHR, where I remain today guiding the strategy, optimization and implementation of IT systems to support care delivery – both at the hospital and the health plan – in a world where we are still in fee for service models, but also value-based payment models (i.e., MassHealth ACO).
- What are your tips on staying informed & effectively disseminating news, given the ever-changing health care landscape? Read, listen to your colleagues, ask questions. Read outside of your industry – there are lessons from all areas that can be applied to your sphere of influence. Write, talk, give presentations – to specialty organizations, academia, topical news outlets – it’s incredibly important to disseminate the good work you are doing so we can all learn from each other.
- What does the future of health care look like for you? Invigorating, complex, and unknown. We will figure out how to harness AI in healthcare delivery to improve outcomes and reduce costs, but we aren’t there yet. We will redesign healthcare delivery to incorporate multiple channels of care delivery include digital, address equity, and holistically care for someone and populations over lifecycles – but we aren’t there yet.
- If somebody googled you, what would they not find out about you? There’s a lot about me online, but we don’t put our kids out there. I have 3 kids – the first two are almost 8 year old twins who are nothing alike in looks or personality, and the third is 4.5 and completed our family. I have passed on my love of skiing and coffee ice cream to them all.
Check back next week for more Q&A with the HFMA Virtual Roundtable panelists. If you would more information on the program or to register, CLICK HERE.
