Blockchains, Apps, eHealth, Innovating to Save Lives… All in a Day’s Work for the Postmodern CIO, Edward Marx/The Cleveland Clinic

Living A Life In Full

Edward Marx is one of the most authentic people I know. He comes from humble beginnings and no silver spoon. Ed had some struggles as a young adult, including a lack of money, being fired from his first job, and having a not-so-stellar college GPA. Fast forward to today and he is CIO of one of the nation’s top healthcare institutions, The Cleveland Clinic.

In between, he served 15 years in the U.S Army Reserve, as both a combat medic and a combat engineer officer. For eight years he was the governor-appointed chairman of the Texas Health Services Authority, providing leadership over health information exchange for Texas—no small task! He is a Fellow of both the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), and he serves on the College’s Faculty for their CIO Boot Camp. CHIME/HIMSS named him CIO of the Year and he’s widely considered one of the top 10 disruptive forces in healthcare!

I consider Ed to be a force of nature because in addition to all of this, Ed serves in professional organizations and on various corporate boards, such as HP, Cisco, AT&T, and Microsoft, as well as having been an advisor to boards for Texas Christian University, University of Texas at Dallas, and Southern Methodist University.

He balances his professional, disruptive, postmodern CIO work by being very involved in his family life, achieving status as a top-ranked triathlete and decathlete (he’s earned spots on TeamUSA in the duathlon as well), he’s a mountaineer, and he’s published his autobiography, “Extraordinary Tales from a Rather Ordinary Guy,” which I think is miss-titled as he certainly is not ordinary!

This episode dives deep into why Ed is known as an IT Rock Star, his 14 guiding principles of leadership, cybersecurity of healthcare information, Blockchain applications to EMRs, the application of IT vis-à-vis innovation in saving lives. We also discuss the impact of Big Data, predictive analytics, and deep learning or Machine learning to medicine and his work.

And Ed has made time to work with Seeds of Hope in Puerta Vallarta community to bring economic and physical transformation to the poorest of the poor, as well as co-founding Open Arms Medical Clinic, a free medical clinic to the Maasai Tribe of Tanzania.

He is an accomplished fellow who had “been there and done that” and demonstrates how to live your life in full.