Gregory R. Wolf, chief information officer at UMass Medical School, is a finalist for a 2021 Boston CIO of the Year ORBIE Award.
Chosen from a pool of 250 nominees, Wolf is one of five finalists in the health care category. Following an independent peer review process led by prior ORBIE winners, finalists were selected based on their business value created by technology innovation, leadership and management effectiveness, and community involvement. BostonCIO has presented the awards in partnership with the Boston Business Journal since 2015.
“The beautiful thing about IT is the enormous breadth of our responsibility and impact. What makes the Medical School very special is that we get to work with students, researchers, clinicians, translational scientists, health care workers, manufacturers. So the breadth of my role is fairly complex in that IT provides technology solutions for this wide range of constituents,” Wolf said.
Wolf leads a team of about 215 people who work in productivity services, academic technology, research technology, information security, operations and engineering.
“At the end of the day, we manage the technology frameworks on which everybody can succeed,” Wolf said. “IT has many talented solution specialists. We build research solutions like the clinical trials management system. We built the data lake. There’s still plenty of innovation and development, but the number one priority of IT is to ensure all Medical School information is secure.”
When COVID-19 hit, Wolf said the Medical School was already well positioned to ensure that students, faculty and staff succeeded on campus and off. The Office 365 conversion had taken place, Zoom was in use, independent learning modules had been introduced and UHealth Solutions’ call centers had been virtualized.
One challenge arose when the state needed additional staffing for long-term care facilities. IT and Commonwealth Medicine automated the matching of long-term care facilities with available and certified care workers. IT also developed the self-reporting health status tool.
Wolf came to UMass Medical School in 2013 after serving as the executive director of research computing platforms at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. He’s also held IT positions at Athenahealth, Parametric Technology Corporation and State Street Bank. Raised in New Jersey, Wolf has a bachelor’s in operational research and information engineering from Cornell University.
The ORBIE Award winners will be announced during a virtual awards ceremony on June 18.
