I am trying to learn more about how hospitals in the Boston area
purchase computer systems and digital data storage solutions. Ideally,
I would like to get a list of contact information (email address or
phone numbers) for the specific people (or organizations) who make
these purchasing decisions for the following list of hospitals:
-- Children?s Hospital; Boston
-- Longwood Pediatrics
-- Dana Farber Cancer Institute
-- Mass General Hospital
-- Brigham and Women?s Hospital
-- Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
-- Newton-Wellesley Hospital
-- Mt Auburn Medical Center
-- Boston Clinical Research Center
-- St Jude Children's Research Hospital
-- Harvard School of Public Health
In many cases, I suspect that the hospitals will use an outside
organization to direct their IT purchasing needs and that in turn
these organizations will have a list of trusted technology
consultancies to keep them up-to-date with the state of the industry.
In these cases, finding a specific individual within the hospital
itself might not be feasible, so instead I would like to get contact
information for these external organizations and a little bit of
information about how they work.

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 18 Sep 2005 09:35 PDT

gusreiber-ga,

Hello there.  

While it's certainly possible to look into all the facilities you
mentioned, I rather doubt that anyone would be able to find the
contact information for the IT folks at each and every hospital.

Which raises the question:  What sort of results will be satisfactory
for you?  Do you only want an answer if we can find 100% of the
listings?  Will you be satisfied with our best effort, regardless of
how many we turn up?  Or is it something in between?

I took a look at Children's Hospital, for starters, and found this:

Dan Nigrin, MD
Chief Information Officer
Children's Hospital Boston 
Wolbach Building, room 115 
300 Longwood Avenue 
Boston, MA 02115 
  email   daniel.nigrin@childrens.harvard.edu 
  phone   +1 617-355-5067 
  fax   +1 617-730-0019 

===============

Is this the sort of contact information you're seeking? 

And again, suppose we can only find some...but not all...of the information?

Let us know what you think.

pafalafa-ga

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Clarification of Question by gusreiber-ga on 18 Sep 2005 11:42 PDT

Your example for Children's Hospital is perfect. I am hoping you can
provide a contact like that for about half of the organizations I have
listed. To augment that, I am hoping you can provide some more general
information about how hospitals in the Boston area go about making
their IT purchases, namely do they use outside organizations that
specialize in IT infrastructure and if so, how does one get in contact
with those organizations.

So to answer your question about what I would consider a good answer,
I would love to get the following:
1) Direct contact information like the example you provided for at
least one person in something like 4 to 8 of the hospitals listed
(Ideally, all, but I don?t expect it. CTO, CIO, or high level IT
manager and multiple contacts per hospital would be helpful, but not
required. A generic IT contact number or email would be better than
nothing.)
2) 1 to 5 general articles about how hospitals buy computer
technologies (from either the hospitals perspective or from that of
the technology vendor)
3) A list of 3 to 5 outside IT purchasing organizations that one or
more of these hospitals use to manage their IT buying with contact
information for those organizations (assuming that many of these
hospitals do outsource their IT buying. I am expecting one of the
items from #2 listed above would confirm that)
4) A list of 3 to 5 technology consultancies in the Boston area who
specialize in selling to hospitals or their purchasing agents in the
Boston area.

Like you, I am not totally certain what you will be able to find, so I
am expecting a best-effort sort of answer. But I am also hoping you
will be willing to do a little bit of a connect-the-dots sort of
effort.

Let me know if I am setting a reasonable scope for my $200.

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Clarification of Question by gusreiber-ga on 20 Sep 2005 14:24 PDT

I have found out a little bit more information on my own and I think I
can make this question a lot simpler.

I really only need the direct contact information of the sort that
matches the example you provided. And, there are 2 basic roles that I
would like contact information for:
-- CIO, CTO, or senior information technology manager
-- Medical Records Director or VP of Medical Records

The hospitals I listed may or may not have all these positions, so if
you can come up with at least one of those roles for at least 7 of the
institutions I have listed and you best effort at getting both for all
of them, I am satisfied.