When Paul Levy first took the job of president and CEO at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in January 2002, he knew that a strong IT department would be the key to turning the financially troubled hospital around. At the time, Levy was executive dean of administration for the Harvard Medical School, and Beth Israel Deaconess is one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals. Levy says he accepted the new position in large part because he knew and respected the hospital’s CIO, John Halamka. Technology is essential to keeping hospital costs down and patients safe. Had the IT department lacked strong leadership and talent, there would not have been sufficient time to turn it around before Beth Israel Deaconess collapsed, he says.

Levy’s trust in Halamka was soon tested by a massive network failure that took the hospital’s systems offline for days. (Read more about the network crash online at www.cio.com/120105.) But Levy didn’t fire his CIO. Instead, he educated himself about the need to invest in and maintain infrastructure. Nearly four years later, Beth Israel Deaconess is profitable, and the medical center has regained its standing as one the country’s foremost teaching hospitals and health-care IT innovators.

Levy is best known for overseeing the cleanup of Boston Harbor as executive director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority from 1987 to 1992. "People laugh when I say this, but there is a similarity between running a sewage treatment facility and running a hospital," he says. What comes into a wastewater treatment system, like what comes into a hospital, "is unpredictable and highly variable." And the outcome of treatment, whether for wastewater or patients, "has to meet very, very strict quality standards." But running a hospital is more complex because every patient requires individual attention.

Levy says Halamka has taught him much about how complex the health-care environment is—and how difficult and expensive it is to apply IT to traditionally paper-based processes such as drug-ordering and medical record-keeping. Nevertheless, Levy wants the hospital to use IT not only to improve its efficiency and quality of care for patients but also to pioneer how technology is used in health care.

Levy talks about how IT can improve hospital efficiency and patient safety, and how he makes hard decisions about IT spending.

CIO: As CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess, what is your vision for IT?

Paul Levy: Information technology is going to transform the delivery of health care in several respects. First, it will transform administrative processes, which include the back office, billing and communication between providers, insurance companies and consumers.