[Updated—6/25/10, 4 pm Eastern time] This is sort of a coincidence. Partners HealthCare chief information officer John Glaser, who three days ago was featured on this site, is resigning from his long-time post to take over as CEO of the hospital software division of the Germany-based conglomerate Siemens, according to the HIStalk blog. (Glaser has written several posts for HIStalk.)
A Partners spokesman has not yet returned a call for comment, and we haven’t received a reply to an e-mail sent to Glaser this afternoon. Siemens confirmed the report this afternoon. [Editor’s note: Siemens confirmed that Glaser has accepted the job in the firm’s health services unit in this press release this afternoon, after this story was initially published.]
Glaser, 55, has had one of the biggest hospital IT jobs in the country as CIO of Partners, which is the Boston-based health system that includes Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and several other medical centers in the Bay State. He took the job in 1995, having previously led IT operations at Brigham and Women’s. And he has recently been advising President Barack Obama’s administration on its $19 billion effort to boost adoption of electronic health records across the country.
The HIStalk blog reports today that an internal communication at Partners says Glaser would be leaving the organization in mid-August to take the chief executive job at Siemens Health Services. While he’s now got about 1,500 employees and a $270 million annual budget at Partners, he’s going to be heading a much larger organization at Siemens—one of the world’s largest providers of healthcare technology.
There has been turnover at the top of Siemens’s Malvern, PA-based health services unit recently. Janet Dillione held the job as CEO of Siemens Health Services until several months ago. In April, Dillione joined the Burlington, MA-based communications and imaging software firm Nuance as head of its healthcare division. According to Nuance, Dillione was responsible for 5,500 employees in her previous post at Siemens.
We’ll update this story as we learn more about Glaser’s big career move.
