University of Pittsburgh Medical Center - Hospital innovators 2007

Location: Pittsburgh, PA Website: www.upmc.com What they're doing: This 19-hospital system and academic medical center, a giant with a 700,000 member health plan, 400 physicians and 43,000 employees, is known for strong specialty areas, including transplantation, cancer, neurosurgery and psychiatry. It has also taken the intriguing step, unusual for any U.S. health system, of building a hospital in Palermo, Italy in partnership with authorities in Sicily. Still, its IT investment strategy may be even more interesting. Spearheaded by CIO Dan Drawbaugh, UPMC has made some aggressive investments in long-term development, and partnered with vendors to a degree seldom seen in hospital settings. Plays including a deal with IBM, under which the IT giant and UPMC will each invest up to $200 million to jointly develop software and systems, as well as buying a piece of clinical data-sharing provider dbMotion. The hospital is also working with Alcatel to develop first-responder technology. Drawbaugh has said that he expects to see "billions of dollars" in returns. (Not surprisingly, UPMC is also a leader in EMR implementation; the system had rolled out EMR systems in 18 of its 19 facilities as of late last year.) Hey, why shouldn't a $6 billion organization sink some of those bucks in new product development? It's great to see a hospital rise above day-to-day concerns and think in venture-capitalist mode.