Dr. Augie Turano is the acting director of Data Migration/ Syndication for the entire enterprise for the $16B EHR conversion of the VA VistA EHR to the commercial Cerner Millennium EHR. Under Dr. Turano’s direction, the Data Migration and Data Syndication Management team has migrated more than one billion VistA health records of 23.7 million veterans to the VA’s new EHR solution, as of September 2020. This migration of information enables advanced data analytics that will drive stronger connections between military service and health outcomes.
Dr. Turano received his BS in chemistry and PhD in structural biophysics at the University of Pittsburgh. His doctoral research involved the molecular structure determination of Vitamin B1 and protein structures and calculation of the electron density distribution of several small molecules. He has worked as a software engineer in the VA for 27 years, developing medical application software with VistA and Mumps, and was CIO for the Pittsburgh VA Critical Care hospital. He also worked in industry for many years and was the Federal Healthcare team architect at Microsoft and VistA architect at HP, before returning to the VA. He worked as a special assistant to the VA CTO, applying domain knowledge and technical skills for the joint EHR work between VA and DoD. Previously he was IT director of VINCI (Veterans Informatics and Computing Infrastructure), where he worked with large datasets for data mining and analysis of both structured and unstructured data. Dr. Turano is also an adjunct associate professor at the University Pittsburgh in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, where he teaches graduate IT classes related to health care.