Healthcare Cybersecurity Pioneer Mac McMillan Wins CHIME Foundation Industry Leader Award

PHOENIX, AZ, Nov. 5, 2019 – After a career that spanned more than two decades in defense, Mac McMillan decided to transfer his knowledge and skills as a security leader to the healthcare sector. What he discovered when he co-founded CynergisTek in 2004 was an industry that was woefully unprepared for the cyberthreats that were lurking. Undeterred, he made it his mission to raise awareness and educate CIOs in provider settings through College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) forums. And when CHIME launched an association dedicated to security leaders in 2014, CHIME tapped McMillan to serve on the inaugural board.

About five years later CHIME has tapped McMillan again, this time with the highest honor given to a Foundation firm member. Today CHIME named McMillan winner of the 2019 CHIME Foundation Industry Leader Award. The award recognizes a CHIME Foundation firm representative who has demonstrated exceptional dedication and made outstanding contributions to the healthcare industry, CHIME and the CHIME Foundation. The award was presented during the 2019 CHIME Fall CIO Forum in Phoenix.

“I am honored and humbled to receive this award,” McMillan said. “When I look back to when I first came into healthcare to where we are today, we are a much different industry with respect to cybersecurity. We are much further along than we were, but we still have a way to go. I think we will get there, though.”

In addition to his educational contributions to CHIME, McMillan served as the keynote speaker at the first Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security (AEHIS) Summit, testified at CHIME’s invitation before a U.S. House Committee about the HHS Data Protection Act, was instrumental in CynergisTek joining the CHIME Foundation and AEHIS Foundation and supported the CHIME Education Foundation and the CHIME Opioid Task Force. He also has been a frequent speaker and presenter at association events, is active in university programs to promote careers in cybersecurity and is a contributing author in the book Information Security in Healthcare: Managing Risk, published by HIMSS.   

“Mac McMillan is a healthcare cybersecurity pioneer,” said CHIME Foundation Chair Cletis Earle, senior vice president and CIO at Kaleida Health. “Our hospitals and health systems are more robust and our patients and their privacy are safer because of Mac’s leadership and commitment. He has been an advocate for CIOs and CISOs and a strong supporter of CHIME and AEHIS.”

About CHIME

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is an executive organization dedicated to serving chief information officers (CIOs), chief medical information officers (CMIOs), chief nursing information officers (CNIOs), chief innovation officers (CIOs), chief digital officers (CDOs) and other senior healthcare IT leaders. With more than 2,900 members in 56 countries and over 150 healthcare IT business partners and professional services firms, CHIME provides a highly interactive, trusted environment enabling senior professional and industry leaders to collaborate; exchange best practices; address professional development needs; and advocate the effective use of information management to improve the health and care in the communities they serve. For more information, please visit chimecentral.org.

Contact
Candace Stuart
Director of Communications and Public Relations, CHIME
734.665.0000
[email protected]