An Internet expert and former IBM vice president has gone back to school and earned a degree, not related to technology or business, but health administration.
John R. Patrick earned a doctor of health administration degree from the University of Phoenix in March.
Mr. Patrick adds the doctorate to his degrees in electrical engineering, management and law.
He said he became intrigued by the field of health care and its challenges after serving on the board of Danbury Hospital and the Western Connecticut Health Network from 2003 to 2013. He held positions as chairman of the planning and quality committees.
“In working with the hospital, I became convinced that our nation’s health care system could be improved, and decided to pursue a degree in the field,” he said. His research dissertation discussed the effect of CardioNet home telemonitoring for congestive heart failure patients.
Mr. Patrick, president of consulting firm Attitude LLC, was vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for 38 years. During his career, he helped launch the company’s leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and he was the senior marketing executive for the launch of the ThinkPad brand. In the early 1990s, Mr. Patrick began traveling around the world evangelizing a positive future for the Internet. He was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994 and a founding member and past chairman of the Global Internet Project. He is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives.
Mr. Patrick is a board member at Mediabistro Inc. in New York and the Online Computer Library Center in Dublin, Ohio, and is a member of the WCHN Biomedical Research Institute Advisory Council. He is the author of Net Attitude, a 2001 book about the future of the Internet, and he is working on a new book about the future of health care and how the Internet and other technologies will improve the quality of health care and make it more affordable.
Library talk
Mr. Patrick will offer a preview Thursday, June 26, at 7 p.m. at the Ridgefield Library.
“American health care has many things to be proud of, but evaluated globally, our cost, quality, and access do not compare favorably,” he said. “However, we are at the cusp of a number of breakthroughs arising from the combination of medical and Internet technologies with smartphones, cloud computing, big data and analytics, personal genomics, and 3D printing of organ tissues.”
Mr. Patrick lives in Ridgefield with his wife Joanne. His blog is at patrickWeb.com and he may be followed on Twitter @johnrpatrick.