Transitions: Comings and Goings, Appointments and Promotions

Nursing

Karen Conley, DNP(c), MS, RN, AOCN, NEA-BC

Karen Conley, DNP(c), MS, RN, AOCN, NEA-BC, joined BWH in July as  associate chief nurse for the Connors Center for Women and Newborns in July. As associate chief nurse, Conley oversees 540 nurses in Labor and Delivery, Antepartum, Postpartum, Gynecology and Gynecologic Oncology, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the Nurse Midwifery Service.

Conley, who began her career as a staff nurse at BWH, most recently served as senior vice president of Patient Care Services and chief nursing officer at Quincy Medical Center. She received her bachelor's degree in nursing from Boston College, and her master's in nursing administration from Northeastern University. She receives her doctorate in nursing practice from the MGH Institute for Health Professions in September.

Information Systems
Two esteemed IS leaders will be leaving BW/F to take on new and exciting challenges. Sue Schade, chief information officer at BW/F, has accepted the position of chief information officer at the University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers (UMHHC) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Eric Poon, MD, MPH, corporate manager for Clinical Systems and director of Clinical Informatics, has been named vice president and chief medical information officer at Boston Medical Center. 

Sue Schade

In her new role at UMHHC, a premier health care system and highly regarded academic medical center, Schade will lead information technology activity there, providing direction and oversight for the hospitals and clinics. Reporting directly to the UMHHC CEO, she also will have the opportunity to collaborate closely with the CIOs of their medical school and university on multiple initiatives. 

Among her accomplishments during her 12-year tenure at BW/F, Schade developed a formal IT governance structure and process to establish critical path projects, such as eMAR, ICD-10 and meaningful use. She has led BWH efforts to build out and broadly deploy our robust internally developed systems in support of our patient safety, quality and cost reduction goals, including order entry, eMAR and LMR. Leveraging vendor technologies, her team successfully implemented the Balanced Scorecard initiative that has received national recognition and been viewed as best practice by many provider organizations. Her team also completed a large scale deployment of RFID (radio frequency identification) for equipment tracking, and implemented voice recognition for transcription resulting in more than $10 million in accumulated savings.

Eric Poon, MD, MPH

Poon's new position at BMC provides him a unique opportunity to blend his expertise of the electronic health record implementation with his knowledge of analytics and health care operations, and to apply the skills he has learned at the Brigham and at Partners to improve the health care of an underserved patient population in our city. Some of his achievements at BW/F include the successful development and deployment of eMAR for oncology and newborns and the web-based discharge module. He also built a strong clinical systems analyst team. His research has helped prove the cost-effectiveness of barcode medication verification technology in the pharmacy and at the bedside.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact Sue Schade, who will remain in her role as CIO through the end of September.

Primary Care

Lisa Whittemore, department administrator for the BWPO and a member of Partners HealthCare's Primary Care Steering Committee, has accepted the position of vice president for Network Performance Improvement at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. This is an opportunity for her to lead an important initiative focused on improving patient care.

Lisa Whittemore

Whittemore joined BWH in 2005 as senior administrator for Primary Care responsible for the leadership of 15 practice locations. In 2008, she was named executive director for Licensed and Affiliated Health Centers, and worked with senior leadership within the organization to develop strategy and maximize our affiliations among affiliated health centers. Since Partners began developing a Primary Care strategy, Whittemore has been leading that effort for the system to help transform the health delivery system towards the patient-centered medical home model.