2011-up-and-comers-gretchen-tegethoff

Gretchen Tegethoff has worked her way up through the ranks in the health information technology industry to reach her current position as chief information officer at 339-bed George Washington University Hospital in the nation's capital. She may not stop there. Tegethoff, 36, has been CIO at GWUH since March 2005 and been with for-profit Universal Health Services' only teaching hospital, in two hitches, for nearly 10 years. As CIO, she is leading the implementation of an electronic health-record system with its first phase set for launch in November. The enterprise-wide installation will replace more than a half dozen “best of breed” systems. “It's going to be big bang, everything except full house CPOE, an anesthesia module and kind of our second phase of biomedical device integration,” Tegethoff says. She has doubled as co-chair of the facility readiness and leadership team for the implementation of the same, remote-hosted EHR system across UHS' 24 acute-care hospitals. Tegethoff first came to GWUH as a clinical systems analyst in 2000, working more than three years on such projects as implementing computer systems for labs, blood bank, pharmacy and the obstetrics departments. In between, she served as a technical analyst at STG, Reston, Va., a systems support contractor for the State Department. Before that she held several IT leadership positions as well as writer/editor of protocols and patient summaries of cancer trials for the National Cancer Institute's website. Tegethoff was nominated by Richard Correll, head of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, “in light of her contributions to the healthcare field, both at her hospital and to the industry as a whole, through her leadership in industry organizations.” Tegethoff is a member of CHIME, a professional association for CIOs and other health information management leaders, and was elected in 2010 to the organization's board of trustees. Tegethoff says that her career arc might not end as a CIO, and that IT might be the career path of choice for some future CEOs. “A few years back, there were a lot of CIOs becoming COOs,” she says. “I know from my experience here, I report directly to the CEO. He's unique in that he's taken the time to really learn IT and see what it does to run the hospital. So we make a great team. And we've had a lot of conversations about how IT is intertwined in strategy. It does seem like a logical career path for some who are interested in that.” And is she interested? “I never pictured myself, when I was a med tech, in the area of computers at all, but once I started moving in that direction, I could see where I wanted to end up,” Tegethoff says. “I'm happy with my position. I like being a CIO. But who's to say. Maybe it's a possibility I'd want to strive for one of these days.”