Pappalardo, credited as founder of the EHR industry, led the company for 56 years after establishing it in 1969.
A. Neil Pappalardo, founder and chairman of MEDITECH, died Jan. 27 at age 83. He founded the company on Aug. 4, 1969, and continued to serve as a guiding force for more than five decades in healthcare technology.
Pappalardo is widely credited as the founder of the electronic health record (EHR) industry. His engineering background included co-authoring the healthcare-specific programming language MUMPS, which helped launch the independent healthcare software industry. He pioneered the vision of integrated application solutions to automate hospital departments and created the foundation of “one patient, one record” EHR integration.
“The greatest challenge was simply explaining what software was. Potential hospital customers had little or no idea what we were selling and, more importantly, how it could possibly benefit them,” Pappalardo once noted about the initial hurdles, according to a press release from MEDITECH on his death.
After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964, Pappalardo began his career as a programmer at Massachusetts General Hospital. There, he observed the complex, error-prone, and paper-intensive clinical processes of the 1960s and recognized the need for technology to create a safer and more collaborative care environment.
“I realized there’s probably a market for this, and the only way I would ever get my work into the marketplace was actually to start a company specifically to carry my work forward,” Pappalardo once explained about founding MEDITECH, according to the MEDITECH press release.
Building an Industry Leader
Under Pappalardo’s leadership, MEDITECH began with a handful of employees in a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, office and grew to become one of the largest fully integrated EHR vendors in the industry. The company now supports more than 2,000 customers across 29 countries.
“Neil was a true visionary whose ambitions were not driven by fame or fortune, but by a profound desire to make healthcare better for everyone,” says MEDITECH vice chairman and former president and COO Lawrence Polimeno, Pappalardo’s initial employee, in a release. “His dedication was to people—his employees, customers, and the patients they serve. He built a company and a culture that will continue to inspire future generations to focus on innovation, value, and compassion for one another.”
Pappalardo remained committed to making modern healthcare technology affordable and accessible worldwide, according to MEDITECH, reflecting his belief that every community deserves access to advanced technology. These efforts included leveraging MEDITECH’s laboratory solutions to help combat AIDS in Africa.
Focus on Continuous Innovation
Pappalardo was an advocate for perpetual innovation, insisting that technology companies must continually reinvent themselves to thrive. This philosophy led him to continually rewrite MEDITECH’s software with a user-centric design.
“We now live by the rules of the technological imperative. We must continue redeveloping our products…we must strive to make the human interface easier to comprehend and easier to use,” he once stated, according to the MEDITECH press release.
Even after stepping down as CEO in 2010, Pappalardo remained invested in the company’s success and took particular interest in the launch of MEDITECH Expanse, the industry’s web and cloud-native EHR platform. He continued in an advisory role, helping ensure Expanse was designed to put the human experience at the forefront.
Leadership Transition
The company announced that Michelle O’Connor, president and CEO, will serve as interim chair until the regularly scheduled April board meeting. Pappalardo’s family intends to maintain MEDITECH’s current ownership structure with no anticipated changes to the company’s operations or ownership model.
Pappalardo leaves behind his wife of 61 years, Jane; four children; 13 grandchildren; and an extended family. Tributes honoring Pappalardo’s legacy can be left on MEDITECH’s website.
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