ECRI, an independent, nonprofit health services organization that provides technology solutions and evidence-based guidance to healthcare decision-makers worldwide, has named Benjamin Dai, MS, TOGAF, its new chief technology officer and chief information officer. Dai brings to the role more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in engineering and information technology (IT) at Fortune 100 companies across healthcare provider, payer, medical device, consumer product, and biomedical research industries.   

“IT and security are core capabilities for our organization’s success,” says Marcus Schabacker, MD, PhD, president and CEO at ECRI. “Benjamin brings a focused interest to the intersection of technology, disruptive innovation, enterprise collaboration, and workforce wellness, all through the lens of transformation in the digital age.”    

Dai is responsible for driving the ongoing digital transformation of ECRI’s externally facing products and services and internally facing business operations. “With ECRI, I have found an exceptional opportunity to advance evidence-based patient care by integrating meaningful data with world-class technologies and business capabilities,” says Dai. 

“Using machine learning and seamless integration of diverse datasets, we are helping healthcare organizations across the care continuum to implement total systems of safety with critical medical device alerts notifications, recall verifications, functional equivalent product alternatives, and patient safety analytics,” Dai continues. 

Dai’s global expertise includes health technology delivery and enterprise architecture, biomedical informatics, end-to-end software delivery, infrastructure, portfolio management, analytics, and all aspects of IT leadership. Select career highlights include the release of BioPortal 2.x, a comprehensive repository of biomedical ontologies, through his work at Stanford University, and the operationalizing of the first delivery of KP Advance Alert Monitor, a predictive analytics solution to reduce intensive care unit patient mortality, while employed at Kaiser Permanente.