Innovation the Cleveland Clinic Way: Powering Transformation by Putting Ideas to Work

Preface

Anil Jain came to Cleveland Clinic right out of medical school in 1998, just as we were pioneering a new approach to medical record keeping—the electronic medical record or EMR, which eliminated cumbersome paper files, reduced medical errors, and allowed doctors to enter and retrieve patient data at the touch of a keyboard.

A dedicated physician, Dr. Jain is also a self-described health information technology (HIT) “nut.” He perceived that the EMR could be a fount of knowledge for medical researchers, with its millions of patient data points, trackable across time and robust with information on the inception, progress, and treatment of every possible disease condition.

But the information was locked behind firewalls, buried in incompatible ...