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VICE PRESIDENT AND CIO
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York
At New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Pat Skarulis has elevated data management to an art form.
Terms like "dynamo," "self-starter," and "go-getter" were coined to describe people like Patricia Skarulis, vice president and CIO at Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in Manhattan.
Skarulis, who arrived as a new CIO at the prestigious cancer care organization six years ago, hasn't spent a moment letting moss grow on anything. Instead, she has moved forward with alacrity, working hand in hand with Memorial Sloan-Kettering's distinguished specialist physician leaders to implement leading-edge information systems.
Not only have the IT and clinician leaders at MSKCC been innovating across a range of clinical areas, including protocols-driven physician order entry, they have also been developing a leading-edge data warehouse to support both patient care and advanced clinical research. "One of the things that I'm extremely excited about is progress with our data warehouse," Skarulis says.
"We've got over 1 million patients in it, with data going back over 20 years; and though we had had this data, it had been stored in such a way that it would require very skilled data warehouse specialists days to extract relevant data for queries."
Given the very heavy needs being pressed upon their store of clinical data, Skarulis and her colleagues brought "a good portion of that data, a subset that is expanding monthly, into a Web-based portal for all our clinicians, administrators, and researchers." The HIPAA-compliant process facilitates de-identified data extraction for...