Dr. Gregory A. Ator

Chief Medical Informatics Officer – University of Kansas Hospital and University of Kansas Physicians.

Associate Professor of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery – University of Kansas Medical Center.

Dr. Ator is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer of the University of Kansas Hospital and University of Kansas Physicians. He is also a practicing Otolaryngologist with practice focused on medical and surgical disease of the ear.

He has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and over 10 years of practice and training in medical informatics. He has acted as the physician champion for the installation of several different electronic medical records in multiple surgical and medical ambulatory clinics as well as computerized documentation and order entry systems for the inpatient domain.

Dr. Ator, a supporter of the digitalization of medicine, feels the next few years will be incredibly important to the future of American healthcare. Heretofore, physicians have been enduring the difficulties of that digitalization with the challenging transformation of scribbles on paper to characters on computer screens. Soon we will be able to harness this information for the benefit of our patients, practices and the greater society. Health Information Exchange, as LACIE is doing, will be one great step in the right direction. However, even as these positive developments occur, physicians must be actively involved in these transformations as we replace the pen with the tools of the digital age of medicine and capitalize on newfound capabilities.