sessionHDM 12. 12
Ed Martinez
Senior VP and CIO
Miami Children’s Hospital
The Martinez File
◉ VP and CIO, Moffitt Cancer Center
◉ Director of I. T. and CTO, Hackensack
University Medical Center
◉ B.S., Electrical Engineering, New Jersey
Institute of Technology
Many people who start out want- ing to be doctors end up in health I. T., and so it proved to be for Ed Martinez, who was re- cently named Innovator of the
Year by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. He switched his undergraduate major from pre-med to electrical engineering
and took to the computer field upon graduation.
An early job in the health care arena for payroll
services leader ADP led to a spot at now-defunct
Cabrini Medical Center in New York, where Mar-
tinez learned that health I. T. was lagging 20 years
behind anything in corporate America. “[Health
care institutions] were stuck in their old ways and
not embracing new technologies, but then man-
aged care came into play and we had to automate
to make some money,” he says. “Things changed al-
most overnight.”
Now he thinks the industry has substantially
caught up, and certainly Miami Children’s Hospital
has bounded forward. It’s now at HIMSS Analytics
Stage 7 (up from Stage 2 when Martinez arrived in
2009). Martinez estimates the hospital has made
five years’ worth of I.T. transitions in 18 months
on the clinical side, and he’s planning to do the
same trick on the financial side over the next 18
months as he replaces a 41-year-old billing system.
Meanwhile, an e-health initiative with an elabo-
rate telemedicine component is putting MCH’s
pediatric subspecialists within reach of patients
HIT Engineer
Interview by Elizabeth Gardner
across the country, and even the world. (MCH has
agreements with several other countries to provide
services, including Russia, Ecuador, Peru, and the
Vatican.) HDM talked with Martinez about how
telehealth is transforming care.
On provider shortages
There are not enough pediatric subspecialists to go
around. To see a pediatric neurologist, there’s a four
to six month wait time. If a concerned parent has to
wait six months to get their kid in to see someone,
they’ll go somewhere else, and the care might not
be as good. If I can facilitate having them see a kid
[via telehealth] and determine the next step in their
treatment, it could be done in hours. If we can provide the quality to more kids remotely, we’ll have
created a huge shift in the paradigm of how health
care works.
On costs
The cost of a telehealth visit is significantly less
than a physical visit and specialists can do four
times the volume with less overhead. They’re
mostly looking at electronic information—the
history, the EKG, the X-ray—and they can make
an immediate diagnosis. All of this is a reduction
in the cost of care, so it makes it easier to provide
more care. That’s why we want ACA (the Florida
Medicaid program) to embrace this model. If we
can reduce its cost from $30 to $15 per visit, that’s a
substantial savings for the state.
