Matthew Anderson
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
University Health Network
Matthew Anderson is the Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for University Health Network (UHN), Canada’s largest acute-care teaching hospital.
Anderson leads the organization’s information management strategy, which aims to improve the patient experience, achieve the best clinical outcomes and ensure accountability through information and technology. He also heads the organization’s complement of information services, including telecommunications, health records, performance measurement, risk management, medical engineering and medical imaging – representing an annual spend of more than $100 million.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Brunswick, Anderson received his Masters of Health Administration from the University of Toronto. His career in health care and information systems began at St. Michael’s Hospital in the Strategic Planning department before he moved to the Toronto Hospital as a Manager in the Utilization Management department.
Further to his early career in hospitals, Anderson served as Acting General Manager with HealthLink Clinical Data Network, a share capital corporation. While managing HealthLink, Anderson was instrumental in restructuring its debt and securing investment for long-term viability. In addition, he developed and implemented initiatives that strengthened and enhanced HealthLink’s integrated health information network, linking health-care providers throughout Ontario.
At the age of 28, Anderson became the youngest CIO of a Canadian academic health sciences centre, establishing a five year, $50M capital plan to move University Health Network to a completely electronic patient record. Five years later, all other technology functions within UHN were added to Anderson’s portfolio, including Canada’s largest Medical Imaging group.
As CIO, Anderson implemented a number of electronic tools, enhancing UHN’s clinical and administrative functions. Specifically, clinical staff are using a computerized physician order entry and results review system, electronic ECG system, and online pathology orders. As well, online reporting capabilities and a comprehensive corporate Intranet offer enhanced support to administrative staff.
UHN continues to advance in the area of health record services through the implementation of an automated discharge summary and development of intuitive voice recognition tools – initiatives that have had a dramatic impact on reducing the paper record, changing dictation practices and resulting in a projected cost reduction of 75%. As well, the organization is a leader in performance measurement initiatives, improving the quality of UHN information, establishing indicators to assess performance for improved hospital services and integrating key human resources as well as financial data for comparison to other external benchmarks.
In May 2004, Anderson began serving as CIO for the Toronto Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) as part of a joint initiative integrating UHN with the Toronto CCAC at the information systems level. This initiative later expanded to include St. John’s Rehabilitation Hospital, Bridgepoint Health and the North York Community Care Access Centre. While developing an Information Systems (IS) operating plan for the partnership, Anderson drives collaboration, consistency, standards and cooperation to facilitate the electronic sharing of key referral information among community providers and partner hospitals.
In May 2005, Anderson received Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 award, which celebrates Canadian leaders of today and tomorrow who have reached a significant level of success but have not yet reached the age of 40. The Top 40 Under 40 is published annually in Report on Business.