The Office of the CIO runs a very lean PMO.

Most of the OCIO project managers work within the Office of the CIO as functional managers and team leaders, with some serving in other staff positions. However, we have worked hard to push project ownership to our customers, and so most of our major initiatives also include a customer-side project lead. These project leads include nurses, doctors, business analysts, researchers, and staff from a variety of other disciplines. This effort has led to many of our customers pursuing project management careers, and we now have nurses, business analysts, clinical analysts, and research-based staff members not only running their own projects, but also attaining their PMP credential.

Yes, project management crosses all disciplines!

Our formal PMO includes two full time members and one part time contributor. However, the OCIO has worked hard to erase team lines and so we often find ourselves being embedded into a variety of teams during the life of a project.

Dan Furlong, MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, SSCPM, ASCPM, CPM

Dan currently manages the Project Management Office for MUSC's CIO as well as being given the privilege of serving as Adjunct Faculty within the MHA program. Dan started with MUSC in 1998 when he was hired to recover a mission critical Y2K project that was falling behind on their schedule. Dan worked with payroll & HR systems, student systems, and a variety of in-house developed departmental applications before being given responsibility of the software development team within what was then called "CCIT". When Dr. Frank Clark arrived in 2003 he created a PMO and moved Dan to his current position.

Dan was the first PMP certified wtihin the OCIO and has trained and help certifiy almost two dozen other project managers at MUSC since 2004. Dan was in the inaugural Sr. State Certified Project Manager class and the inaugural Associate State Certified Project Manager class, and was the first person in SC to earn both certifications from the State.

In addition to serving as PMO, Dan also teaches within the MUSC College of Health Professions Masters in Health Administration program and in The Citadel's School of Engineering Masters in Project Management program.

In 2007 he was named "PMI Charleston's Person of the Year" and "GMIS International's IT Professional of the Year" for his work promoting and supporting project management efforts within the State. He currently serves as the past-President of SC.GMIS (www.scgmis.org) and Chairman of PMI Charleston (www.pmi-charleston.org) along with serving on the "CIO Forum Advisory Council". In 2008 he graduated from PMI's Leadership Institute Masters Class, which accepts 50 people into their program annually, and was named a top 10 semi-finalist in the 2008 Kerzner International Project Manager of the Year Award.

Jeff Burdick, PMP, CPHIMS

Jeff has managed a wide variety of projects over his almost 30 year career at MUSC. He joined the PMO this summer following his prior role as a Health Information Management Consultant working primarily with Clinical Systems. 

Jeff spent his first year of high school attending grammar school in Wales, GB, graduated from the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia and went on to Denison University in Granville, Ohio as an early acceptance student on a full academic scholarship. Jeff began working with computers in health care as an Examination Editor for the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), where he played a part in an innovative project to assess the continuing competence of previously certified internists through interactive encounters with computer-simulated patients. This position also afforded Jeff the opportunity to work closely with one of the members of an expert committee developing the exam, Dr E. Carwile LeRoy, who had come to Charleston to head a Division in the Department of Medicine at MUSC. Jeff was recruited and joined the Division as a Project Developer, where he planned, coordinated & evaluated a number of community, education and research activities, including creating a data acquisition system for the chronic rheumatic diseases. After six years in the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology, Jeff went back to school and obtained a BS in Medical Record Administration from MUSC. After internship, he achieved his registry (RRA back then, now called RHIA) in 1983. Jeff then began working as a Project Administrator in Hospital Administration, where he helped establish Hospital Computer Services as a Department and became its first Director.

Following MUSC's decision to outsource IT services, Jeff filled a number of roles, in IS Planning, Purchasing Coordination and Health Information Consulting, both internally & externally. He served as Manager of the HAS team for 3 1/2 years, ushering in Y2K and the advent of APCs. Jeff spent over 15 of his years at MUSC providing guidance on a wide variety of information system projects; specifically he has worked with end-users, vendors and technical support staff to select, install, integrate or support systems for ADT/Registration, Medical Records, Master Patient Index (MPI), Patient Accounting, Clinical Documentation/Results, Therapeutic Services (PT, OT, RT, SP, NP, etc), Dispatch & Trauma/Emergency Department, Surgical Services/ORs, Pharmacy, Radiology (both RIS & imaging), Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Practice Management, Psychiatry, Home Health, Dialysis, Transplant, Budgeting & Decision Support, Credentialing, Dictation/Transcription, Document Imaging, Cardiology (ECGs, Echos, other imaging), Time & Attendance, Labor & Delivery (including fetal monitoring), ICU monitoring, Telemedicine, Employee Training & Tracking, Ophthalmology, CPOE/Dietary Orders, Infection Control/Biosurveillance, Quality & Outcomes Measurement and Clinical Research, among others. He has promoted the Stage Gate IS approval process, developed the first Joint Commission-mandated IM Plan, served on the initial HIPAA Steering Committee, represented IS for the MUHA Capital Allocation Program, and participates as a long-term member of the Medical Record Committee.

Jeff was on the faculty as an Adjunct Instructor in Health Information Administration from 1984 through 2002 and taught a Medical Terminology course for 2 years. He has been a member of HIMSS for almost 20 years, achieving his CPHIMS designation the beginning of this year. He earned his PMP in December, and will be focused initially on the first phase of the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) project, as well as on helping Dan to extend PMO policies, procedures and services.