Ivo Nelson

Biography

Ivo Nelson, a 23-year veteran of information systems and reengineering, is Leader of IBM’s Healthcare Industry, Global and Americas, with responsibility for all of IBM’s Healthcare Industry. He is also former CEO of Houston-based Healthlink Incorporated, a company he built to be the nation’s largest privately held, provider-focused healthcare information systems consulting firm. IBM acquired Healthlink in June 2005.

Prior to Healthlink, Mr. Nelson served with corporations such as EDS and Perot Systems. While at Perot Systems, he helped start the Healthcare division and developed it into a $50 million business in a three-year period. Then, in 1992, he cofounded the Insource Management Group, later renamed Healthlink Incorporated. While leading the company, Mr. Nelson engineered six acquisitions and mergers, which when combined with strong internal growth helped make Healthlink one of the fastest growing companies in Houston and the healthcare industry. In 2005, Healthlink was named to Healthcare Informatics magazine’s top 100 healthcare information technology companies by revenue for the seventh consecutive year.

In 2002, Mr. Nelson initiated an internal R&D project called Prolink4™, which utilized the company’s process experience and the expertise of its many consultants, to create a revolutionary vendor-specific, process-centric set of methodologies and tools for strategic planning, system selection, and system implementation. This approach helped propel the company into prominence, and in 2004, Healthlink was ranked Number One in clinical implementation in the October 2004 KLAS professional services study.

Mr. Nelson is recipient of the prestigious Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2005 Award for the Houston and Gulf Coast Region in the IT category. He actively serves the healthcare IT industry through his involvement in many of the industry’s leading associations. He is a former Vice Chair of the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the largest association in the healthcare information systems industry, which represents more than 13,000 professionals from provider, payer, and life sciences organizations. He is also past Chairman of the Texas Institute for Health Policy Research, one of the few healthcare policy research institutes in the country. Mr. Nelson serves on the Advisory Boards of the Institute for Innovation in Health Care Facilities Planning, the University of Connecticut Health Care Information Technology Program, and Nextel Communications. He has also served on the Board of the Joint Healthcare Information Technology Alliance and currently serves on a subcommittee of the Christus Board of Directors, providing oversight to its IT strategy.

Mr. Nelson has been named one of the most influential people in the healthcare IT industry in a survey conducted by the magazine ADVANCE for Healthcare Information Executives. He was one of only two business representatives voted to represent healthcare businesses on the board of the Center for Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), an organization whose members are exclusively made up of CIOs in the healthcare industry. He was also the Chairman of the Center for Healthcare Information Management (CHIM), the association that represents vendors and consultants in the healthcare industry. In 2001, Mr. Nelson led the effort to merge CHIM with HIMSS, creating a consolidated association of individual members active in the healthcare industry with a new corporate membership of vendors and consultants.