Spinning new technology at Children's
Within the halls of Children's Hospital Boston Daniel Nigrin, MD, MS, is known as an endocrinologist and the hospital's chief information officer, but outside of Children's, it's his passion for music and technology that really defines him. A former techno music DJ spinning in nightclubs throughout the greater Baltimore/Washington D.C. area, Nigrin's experience creating electronic music has helped shape the way he views technology at Children's today.
Nigrin's interest in technology can be traced back to his undergraduate and medical school years at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a DJ for the college radio station. His show explored the beginnings of electronic dance music, through genres known as industrial and electro, and what is known today as techno.
As his knowledge of electronic music grew, Nigrin began to make synthesized music of his own. And following the success of demo songs created with a friend and picked up by independent record labels around the world, the duo formed their own label, Defective Records. Defective went on to release over 30 albums of music by Nigrin and other musicians.
But the composition of electronic music soon started to trend away from synthesizers, making its way onto the PC scene through software. So Nigrin took to writing music software, which he still creates and distributes over the Internet in his spare time.
In 1995, Nigrin left the Baltimore techno scene—and his pediatric residency—behind and headed to Children's to complete a fellowship in endocrinology. But his interest in technology remained, so he became a fellow in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program under the mentorship of the program's director, Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, and pursued a master's degree in Informatics through the Division of Health Sciences and Technology, a joint division of Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As part of his fellowship, Nigrin created software that performed automated analyses of the hormonal tests that patients with various endocrine conditions often undergo. He also built prototype systems that allowed diabetic patients to communicate blood sugar data to their care providers securely over the Web—an idea that caught on, as there are now several commercial systems that do similar things.
After completing his respective fellowships, Nigrin took a permanent position at Children's in 1998, and continued to conduct medical informatics research while seeing patients. Then in 2000, he took on the newly created role of director of Clinical Computing. "I served as the liaison between the technical staff in ISD [Information Services Department] and the medical staff; I spoke both languages," he says. "And when our then-chief information officer left several months later, I was asked to step in as CIO."
Four years later, Nigrin's tenure has been marked by an enormous list of accomplishments, including the PeopleSoft ERP system; the PACS imaging application Synapse; the ECD documentation system; the Epic registration, billing, scheduling and medical records applications; and systems to improve employees' connectivity to Children's when outside the hospital. And more is certainly on the way, as ISD prepares to roll out the first major phase of the hospital's clinical implementation system project, CHAMPS (Children's Hospital Applications Maximizing Patient Safety), later this year. Additionally, Nigrin was recently honored as one of Computerworld magazine's 2005 Premier 100 IT Leaders for the positive impact he has made on technology at Children's.
"It's exciting to be in a position where I can implement new technologies that I know will improve the way we care for patients, conduct our research and run our enterprise," says Nigrin. "While the process of getting them into users' hands is much more difficult than I would've ever thought, good collaboration between ISD and other departments really makes it happen."
"And although it's more of a hobby these days," he adds, "my interest in and experience writing music software has definitely helped me understand and appreciate the challenges ISD faces in developing and implementing new software and systems."
