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The seventh in a series of nine profiles, offering expanded coverage of our Healthcare IT Innovator award winners announced in the September 2005 issue.
Kevin Palattao, vice president of patient care systems at HealthPartners in Minneapolis, has been a champion of innovation since childhood.
It sounds like a nice story: A boy from the Midwest grows up to become one of the country's top healthcare IT professionals. He creates an online scheduling system that allows patients to book their own appointments from home on the Internet, and is responsible for one of the largest EMR rollouts in the United States. He grows up to be vice president, patient care systems at HealthPartners, Minneapolis, and becomes one of the industry's best innovators, but Kevin Palattao's story is not over yet.
Palattao was born into medicine and raised in Minnesota. "I've been running around clinics and hospitals for most of my life," he says. The son of a physician father and nurse mother, Palattao understood early on what business, medicine and family meant. Palattao didn't see that much of his father growing up, he will admit. "He would round in the hospital in the morning, see patients all day, and then round in the hospital on his way home."
In the summer, Palattao would help his father in his small private practice - organizing the medical room, handling overdue billing - but even early on his eye was focused on change. "I was always struck by, God, these guys work so hard. There's got to be a better way."
For college, Palattao chose the University of California at Berkeley where he majored in political science with a slant towards international relations - an education that taught him to analyze problems on a deep level. "We have to ask the question 'Why?' over and over and over," which is, Palattao says, what drives him in his current role. While still in school, Palattao got a hands-on operations position at a start-up Bay-area video delivery company, managing inventory, delivery and management.
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