Richard S. Bakalar, MD

Richard Bakalar, M.D. joined IBM Life Sciences Medical Imaging Team after completing 26 years of military service in the US Navy Medical Corps. As the Senior Clinical Solution Specialist he adds clinical perspective working with IBM and their Business Partners developing integrated eBusiness Diagnostics on demand Healthcare solutions. His hybrid military career includes extensive experience in clinical medicine, military medical flight operations, program management and applied information technology. As the Navys senior clinical champion, Executive Assistant to the Navy Surgeon General for Telemedicine and Program Manager for the Navys Global Teleradiology Network his office fielded and provided integrated logistics lifecycle support for digital imaging systems aboard 21 Naval ships linked via satellite to 3 shore-based medical centers with Radiology PACS. This global network supports an additional 20 remote hospitals and clinics with Teleradiology services worldwide. As the Navy project manager for the Multimedia Integrated Distributed Network (MIDN) Telemedicine Project from 1996-1999, he led a series of highly successful prototype demonstrations for global ship-to-shore sustained telemedicine operations and supported military field exercises. By moving medical information via satellite, rather than transferring people via aircraft, these demonstrations yielded a net reduction in medical evacuations of 30% and a resource savings of up to 1,200 man-days over each 6-month battle group deployment. Dr. Bakalar co-founded the awarded winning Virtual Naval Hospital medical reference website (www.vnh.org) in 1997 working in partnership with the University of Iowa. He pioneered clinical workflow re-engineering at the Navys service academy at Annapolis, Maryland which converted its legacy paper-based physical examination evaluation process to a modern more efficient web-based point of care data collection and reporting tool known as CareManager. . Dr. Bakalar is board certified in Internal Medicine and Nuclear Medicine. He has participated as a subject matter expert on multiple Navy and Department of Defense panels, supported NASA and the NATO working group on Telemedicine. He has been a clinical consultant to the Federal Joint Working Group on Telemedicine.