UConn Health’s new interim chief information officer has an added sense of what physicians need out of their information technology. Because he is a physician.

Dr. Adam Buckley, who is board-certified in OB-GYN as well as clinical informatics, took on the interim CIO role in July.

“My passion on the clinical and the health record side is really around the data and the outcomes data, and how you can improve care,” Buckley says. “And my passion on the core IT side is, how do you make your infrastructure and your security such that your patient and provider and employee data are safe, but that people can do their jobs efficiently and make sure those systems always function the way they need to. It’s that system complexity that I fell in love with on the global IT side.”

Buckley most recently served as CIO of the University of Vermont Health Network. He transitioned from direct patient care to informatics in 2012, when he became the chief medical information officer at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Before that he was associate chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and medical director of obstetrics at the Stony Brook Medical Center on Long Island.

“From the patient safety and quality perspective, I’ve always been very driven by how systems impact each other and how you manage systems, complex systems, how patients interact with those complex systems,” Buckley says. “There’s virtually no other system as complex as health IT as it’s grown organically over 25 years, from scheduling and billing to then lab, and now it’s the entire enterprise, from before the patient checks in, to the entire throughput of their experience, to the financial end on the backside.”

UConn Health adopted the electronic health record system Epic in 2018. Buckley’s experience with Epic goes back to 2012.

“Given his background as a physician, chief medical information officer, and CIO, Dr. Buckley is extraordinarily qualified to lead us as we continue to advance our information technology at UConn Health in an efficient, reliable, and, most importantly, secure way,” says Dr. Andy Agwunobi, UConn Health CEO and interim university president.

Buckley succeeds Chuck Podesta, who served as UConn Health’s interim CIO for 18 months.

“Because UConn Health was really focused on getting infrastructure in the healthiest possible space and making the environment secure — really with 21st-century standards, and those are things that are currently being focused on — that was intriguing to me,” Buckley says.

Buckley has an M.D. from the George Washington University School of Medicine and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts.