Health IT

Genomics, cloud security on agenda for new Dell Healthcare CMO van Terheyden

Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences announced Monday morning that it has hired Dr. Nick van Terheyden as its new CMO. Van Terheyden comes over from Nuance Communications, where he served as CMIO for five years.

A month after stepping down as CMIO of Nuance Communications, Dr. Nick van Terheyden has been named CMO of Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences.

While famous for hardware, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell actually is one of the world’s largest providers of IT consulting services, the result of the company’s 2009 acquisition of Perot Systems. “It’s not as well-known as you would expect, given how much we’re doing,” van Terheyden, known in health IT circles as “Dr. Nick,” told MedCity News.

Van Terheyden started last week, though Dell did not announce the hire until Monday morning. He said that he left Nuance on good terms after a five-year stint.

“This was a tremendous opportunity for me. It was a real broadening of the portfolio,” van Terheyden said of the Dell job. A native of the UK, van Terheyden has worked around the world, including in the Middle East and Oceania, and Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences does have a global clientele, particularly in India.

Plano, Texas-based Dell Healthcare & Life Sciences has groups focused on mobile health, cloud computing, cybersecurity and genomics, among other areas. Dell’s healthcare cloud currently stores about 9 billion medical images, van Terheyden said, and most are tied to analytics systems.

In the area of genomics, Dell is partnering with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) on what the company says is the first FDA-approved personalized medicine trial for pediatric cancer. Van Terheyden is a believer in the potential of genomics. “I’m very much in the Eric Topol camp of where things are going,” he said.

Van Terheyden also is bullish on social media in healthcare, and a prolific user himself. He has tweeted nearly 44,000 times since joining Twitter seven years ago. He said one of the factors in taking the job was the fact that Mandi Bishop, a longtime healthcare social media guru, became lead for Dell’s health-plan analytics practice last November.

 

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