A huge fan of the leadership required to get any organization pulling together for change, Amir Hameed, RingCentral’s VP Global Solutions Engineering & Specialists, was honoured to recognize Mari Teitelbaum as 2021 CIO of the Year for the public sector during ITWC’s Digital Transformation Week program.
As CIO & VP Strategy, Quality & Family Partnership for The Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), Mari Teitelbaum had already worked miracles by transforming a cumbersome health information system. Covid-19 was her next call to action. Not only did Teitelbaum make a vital contribution to CHEO’s pandemic effort, but she also contributed to the successful launch of Canada’s first virtual emergency pediatric department.
Teitelbaum took on the CIO/VP role at CHEO in 2014, but her leadership journey began a decade earlier when she worked as an electrical engineer. Even before returning to school to earn a Masters of Health Administration at the University of Ottawa, she had a healthy respect for the value of technology in enabling efficiency and effectiveness.
At the beginning of Teitelbaum’s tenure as CHEO’s CIO/VP, every part of the hospital had its own set of applications. Recognizing the need for a single enterprise solution, she helped fast-track Epic health information system software to introduce key clinical improvements across the hospital. A radical departure from the manual and difficult-to-access systems of the past, Epic has resulted in system-wide benefits, including the reduction of initial consult wait times for new outpatients and anytime access to health information through an online portal called “My Chart”.