George H. Bowers

Principal

Mr. George H. Bowers has over 29 years experience in the healthcare IT industry, 16 of those spent as a Chief Information Officer. Since joining Health Care Information Consultants, LLC in 2002, he has worked closely with several hospital clients providing help in strategic systems planning, vendor selection, systems design, and PACS planning and implementation.

Representative Client Expertience:

  • Managed a strategic IT planning and vendor selection project for one of the nation’s most prestigious children’s hospital.
  • Performed PACS operational assessments in a variety of hospitals ranging from community hospitals to academic medical centers.  Helped the organizations improve efficiency and effectiveness in using PACS.
  • Assisted a hospital in creating an Emerging Technology division within the IT organization.  Project scope included developing a charter for the group, operational procedures, and policies for evaluating emerging technologies.
  • Acted as facilitator for process redesign in a major system implementation projects at a major academic medical center.  Redesigning the workflows required coordination with a multidisciplinary team including nurses, physicians, systems analysts, and programming staff.
  • Developed a strategic plan for implementing PACS in a complex integrated delivery system.  Plan enabled the organization to almost entirely eliminate film.
  • Facilitated the selection of an IT vendor for a state-wide regional health information network.
  • Participated on a project to assess the implementation of an enterprise wide electronic medical record system against industry best practices using the Davies Award winners as best practice examples.

Subject Matter Expertise: 

  • Strategic IT Planning
  • IT Vendor Selection
  • ROI
  • PACS and Teleradiology Planning and Implementation
  • PACS Education/Training

Prior Experience:

Mr. Bowers was the Chief Information Officer for American Radiology Services (ARS), a mega-radiology practice with over 80 radiologists, 13 hospital professional contracts and 14 outpatient imaging centers. ARS was formed by the merger of four large radiology practices in the Baltimore area including the faculty practice for Johns Hopkins. In this role, he developed a strategic plan for all of the information systems requirements for the company including a system-wide radiology information system, teleradiology, picture archiving communications system (PACS), and a data warehouse. During his tenure, he opened several “film-less” imaging centers that use fully-integrated information systems and implemented a state-of-the-art management reporting system that reduced management reporting from weeks-after-the-event to minutes-after-the-event.

Prior to ARS, Mr. Bowers was the CIO of the University of Maryland Medical System for over eight years and was responsible for all aspects of information technology and telecommunications for this multi-hospital academic medical center. In this role, he led the organization to adopt a network-centric approach to better integrate with the University and Medical School and meet the specific requirements of the organization. He oversaw the planning and implementation of 16 different clinical and management information systems ranging from clinical order management to one of the first data warehouses in a healthcare organization. Under his leadership, UMMS established open systems architecture and was an early adopter of HL-7 as its communications standard.

Prior to the University of Maryland, Mr. Bowers was the Vice President of Information Services with Sinai Hospital of Baltimore. He implemented several information systems including patient accounting, clinical order management, general ledger, clinical laboratory, and the earliest electronic mail system installed in a hospital in the US (PC World Magazine, October, 1988).

Mr. Bowers began his career as a consultant for Arthur Andersen & Co. (now Accenture) where he specialized in healthcare, banking and insurance industries.

Education/Affiliations:

Mr. Bowers is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and holds an MBA from George Washington University. He is a Fellow of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society and the Maryland HIMSS Chapter.

He is a member of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine, where he chairs the Education Advisory Network on PACS Administration and is a board member. Mr. Bowers received a CPA certificate from the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1980.

Speaking/Articles:

  • He has written several articles and given presentations at the SIIM Conference, HIMSS, SCAR, MSHISM, and CHIME on the Economic of PACS, Information Theft, EHRs, Storing Diagnostic Images and PACS Administration.
Associated with HCIC since 2002