John C. Barto
Chief Digital Transformation Officer – US Health & Life Sciences, Healthcare Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation
John, Microsoft’s Healthcare Evangelist, is a true visionary at applying technology to solving Healthcare challenges. John gained much of his hands-on experience early in his career when he was a CIO responsible for developing, deploying and managing all the Information Technology assets and personnel for a county hospital in central Ohio. Building on this foundation, he went on to architect and develop the first Preferred Provider Organization(PPO) ranking system, for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan, helped build small to mid-sized Healthcare Information Systems providers and developed Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) systems under a consortium of HMO’s in the state of Michigan. John's contributions to healthcare have global reach as demonstrated when he was involved with creating agreements for the Thailand Ministry of Health to use early forms of TeleHealth to overcome some of the challenges with distributing healthcare into hard to reach rural populations within the country.
Since joining Microsoft in 2011, John has focused his energy on helping Healthcare organizations create engaging experiences focused on health consumers, employees and affiliates which are injected into daily workflows without creating additional effort to their targeted audiences. The secret to these efforts is the ability to spin up new services, test and modify them very quickly based on their measured effectiveness. Increasingly Health organizations are recognizing that offering new experiences in an agile manner requires the support of a robust set of secure, compliant hybrid cloud capabilities that can be easily assembled and deprecated within a business model that has similar flexibility. Mature capabilities in Advanced Analytics, Sensor management, Telecommuting, Cognitive computing and collaboration tools offered within the public cloud are real weapons to improve population health and personalized medicine. A great example would be continuously receiving patient reported data from wearable sensors which can feed analytics models to provide early warning of changing wellness conditions and engage a medical professional for early intervention to control the situation.
A student of the complete healthcare system, John understands the challenges of Healthcare information management and is focused on applying the latest information technology treatments to improve the overall results of the system.