Faculty Profile: Dr. David Higginson

David Higginson has dedicated more than 25 years to children's health care and joined Phoenix Children's in 2011 as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). As CIO, he oversaw all aspects of information technology strategy, project execution, systems design, and technology infrastructure maintenance. Phoenix Children's implemented a fully integrated EMR, Billing, and ancillary clinical systems with a single database and product line integration under his direction. Before transitioning to his current role as Chief Innovation Officer in 2020, David served as Phoenix Children's Chief Operating Officer beginning in 2018, where he was responsible for Nursing, Operations, Information Technology, Supply Chain, Process Optimization and Marketing.

Higginson is an innovator and entrepreneur. He successfully launched and developed his own health care software company, commercialized numerous innovations into patents and successful products and is passionate about operational efficiency and process improvement. He regularly speaks at health care conferences on the evolving role of technology as the efficiency platform underpinning care delivery and the importance of operationalizing the insights provided by data in the EMR. In 2016, Higginson was named "CHIME Innovator of the Year" and was awarded AZ Top Tech's "CIO of the Year" in 2017 and the Phoenix Children's IT department has twice been recognized as the Best Healthcare IT department in the US.

Before taking his position at Phoenix Children's, Higginson was Chief Information Technology Officer at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH) in Little Rock. During his 16-year tenure at ACH, he implemented more than 500 systems and was instrumental in building the IT and research departments as the hospital doubled in size.

After obtaining his degree in accounting/finance from the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, he qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in 1994 while working as an investment analyst in London. At the age of 10, he began developing computer systems. He combined his keen interest in computing with his financial expertise when he developed systems for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the UK's Royal Mail.