Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)

Dr. Kisha Hortman Hawthorne’s healthcare career spans over 18 years. She has extensive experience in the areas of hospital operations, information services, revenue cycles, and project management. Kisha’s expertise includes strategic planning, comprehensive business plans development, information technology, budget management, and staff and leadership development.

As the Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer at CHOP, Kisha’s responsibilities include strategic leadership of the Information Services (IS) department, which includes 550 full-time employees who support over 500 applications and approximately 16,000 employees and 21,000 active directory accounts. She currently holds operational responsibility within Health Information Management (HIM), Coding and Release of Information, and Biomedical Engineering.

Working collaboratively with the IS Executive Committee and other CHOP senior leaders, Kisha manages an enterprise-wide portfolio of over 90 IS projects annually. In addition to her operational leadership, she participates on governance committees, leads IS oversight and leadership groups, and provides regular updates to the CHOP Board of Directors. Overall, Kisha ensures that Information Services is supporting CHOP’s strategic initiatives to protect patient safety and promote information security. These strategic priorities consist of IS Organization & Governance, Infrastructure & Security, Emerging Technology & Transformation, Customer Service and Strategic Foundational Systems.

Currently a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives, Kisha holds a PhD in Information Studies from Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics, a Master of Healthcare Administration from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, a Master of Business Administration from the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences from Florida A&M University. Kisha was recognized as a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2019 recipient of the Most Influential Women in Health IT Award.