Edward Marx to Become New Cleveland Clinic CIO

His focus will be on the ‘Patients First’ culture.

Cleveland Clinic has tapped Edward Marx to be its new CIO.

The former CIO of both Texas Health Resources in Arlington, Texas, and University Hospitals in Cleveland, Marx has most recently served as executive vice president at the Advisory Board Company.

In that role, he has provided IT leadership and strategy for NYC Health + Hospitals, which is undergoing one of the largest Epic implementations in the country. The project aims to unify more than 40,000 users in more than 70 patient care sites.

Marx will step into the CIO role effective September 1, less than a year after Cleveland Clinic signed a five-year agreement with IBM to expand IBM’s cloud, social, mobile and Watson cognitive computing technologies across its clinical and administrative operations. The focus is cognitive population health management and personalized healthcare.

“Ed has spent his career fostering a culture of innovation and leading teams at the forefront of healthcare information technology,” Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Toby Cosgrove, M.D., said in a statement “As CIO he will advance the Cleveland Clinic’s ‘Patients First’ culture by providing information-enabled, data-driven technology focused on facilitating world-class patient care.”

Marx is a Fellow of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

He’s also won HIMSS/CHIME 2013 CIO of the Year, and has been recognized by both CIO and Computer World as one of the “Top 100 Leaders.” Becker’s named Marx as the 2015 “Top Healthcare IT Executive” and the 2016 “17 Most Influential People in Healthcare.”

“Successful healthcare IT has to ask, ‘How do we innovate to save lives?’ ” Marx said in a statement. “Technology has such potential to save many, many more lives, if we can innovate and impact patient safety and the quality of care we deliver.”

Cleveland Clinic’s current interim CIO is Doug Smith.