ADVISORY BOARD - Dr. Michael Shrift

Leadership

Dr. Michael Shrift
Cheif Medical Iinformation Officer and Vice President
Allina Health and Hospitals

Dr. Michael Shrift is Chief Medical Information Officer and Vice President, Clinical Knowledge Management at Allina Health and Hospitals, Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Allina, an eleven hospital, one hundred clinic integrated delivery network, has attained national prominence through leadership in patient care quality and safety.  This is facilitated by the Excellian implementation, a technology suite including the Epic EMR  that earned Allina the Davies Award in 2007.  Dr. Shrift joined Allina in September 2008 to leverage Excellian for patient care workflow, quality and safety improvements.   His teams have rolled out real-time best practice decision support tools and algorithms (Guardrails and Cattleprods) that advance core measure and national patient safety goal compliance.  These were presented at the Epic International Users’ Group as first to market innovations.  They have contributed to Allina attaining best-in-nation diabetes care. 

Prior to joining Allina, Dr. Shrift served 10 years with Centura Heath, a 12 hospital IDN headquartered near Denver, Colorado, where he was most recently CMIO and Vice President of Information Technology.  As Centura’s first CMIO he implemented Cerner PowerChart, Siemens Novius RIS, and later the MEDITECH EMR.  He was also responsible for selecting and implementing Fuji Synapse PACS in what was Fuji’s largest implementation, for which he gave the Fuji global meeting keynote address in 2007.  While at Centura he co-invented MobileMD Health Information Exchange and served as Commissioner to the Governor for the Office of Science and Technology.  

Originally intending to pursue a passion for mathematics and computer science, Dr. Shrift changed direction when a relative was found to suffer from a brain disease.  He attended Stanford University as an undergraduate where he performed CNS research and was a Rhodes Scholar candidate.  He attended Medical School at the State University of New York where his father, Dr. Alex Shrift, led the lab that identified selenium toxicity and deficiency cycles in the biosphere.  He completed residency in Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.  He served as chief resident and then joined the faculty where he investigated withdrawal states in trauma patients and was director of consultation psychiatry.  His strengths in informatics and business consultation led the department to send him for a MBA at the University of Denver Daniels College of Business.  During this time he worked in collaboration with a BC/BS behavioral health HMO carve-out as associate medical director.  Dr. Shrift is a Six Sigma Greenbelt, a Project Management Professional and is ITIL Foundations certified.  He is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. 

Dr. Shrift,  his wife Kathryn and son Luke Kolbe live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.