William M. McClatchey, MD, FACP, FACR
William McClatchey has been a practicing primary care internist and rheumatologist at Piedmont Healthcare, a four hospital system in Atlanta, for almost 28 years. Since 1998, his practice of 8 physicians has been paperless, one of the first in the State of Georgia to achieve this. He has led the clinical information management process at Piedmont Healthcare for most of the past 15 years, the last five of which as the Chief Medical Information Officer. During this time, Piedmont Hospital in downtown Atlanta has become the only non-academic Hospital of its size in the nation to have embraced computer provider order entry (CPOE) throughout all of its inpatient clinical activities. Piedmont Hospital has likewise established new standards of clinical safety and quality performance, based CPOE and on a totally integrated pharmaceutical delivery system, starting with CPOE and running straight through to bedside bar coding administration of all pharmaceutical products to patients. Case adjusted mortality and drug administration error rates remain among the best in the nation. Under his leadership, Piedmont Healthcare is innovating in the area of Telemedicine services to rural health facilities through a collaborative program with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia and the Georgia Telemedicine Program.
Piedmont Hospital has been widely recognized nationally as one of the most sophisticated hospitals in the nation in the field of clinical information management, and has won the coveted Solucient “100 most wired” hospital award six of the past seven years, as well as the 2006 award for clinical informatics excellence from the national Association of Medical Directors of Clinical Information Systems (AMDIS), and the 2006 Davies award for ambulatory EMR. Dr. McClatchey has spoken at multiple national conferences, and has served in leadership positions in various professional societies, including 5 years as the chair of the American College of physicians Committee on Medical Informatics, and on the committee for Ambulatory Medical Record Systems of HIMSS. He continues to divide his time between his responsibilities as the CMIO for Piedmont Healthcare and his busy practice.