Carl W. Taylor

Assistant Dean and Director of the Center
Strategic Health Innovation at the University of South Alabama, College of Medicine

Carl is the Assistant Dean of the University of South Alabama College of Medicine and Director of the Center for Strategic Health Innovation (CSHI). A knowledge leader in the drive towards patient centric healthcare, Carl’s program was selected Regional Innovator of the Year for 2005 by the Southern Growth Policies Board and received a second 2005 Innovator of the Year Award from the Council of State Governments. Under his direction CSHI has created a quality based virtual healthcare link for over 700,000 patients in Alabama by blending e-health, telehealth and informatics technologies. This effort has drawn strong interest from providers, payors, insurers and reinsurors around the country, and even more recently the United Kingdom.  Today the work of CSHI, that began with 23 patients, touches the lives of nearly 1,000,000 people as far away from Alabama as North Dakota, Colorado, New York and Montana.  In support of these efforts CSHI has developed a suite of proprietary tools including RMEDE a patient centric health data aggregator and Wahinga an agent based model to predict interventional impact on health costs. Beyond e-health he is also a leader in disaster preparedness and response.  Carl is the Principal Investigator on over dozen contracts and grants for disaster preparedness including the operation of the Advanced Regional Response Training Center in Mobile, Al. Under his direction, CSHI develops and deploys a broad suite of disaster preparedness and response tools including, e-VAST an online hazard and vulnerability program,  and an evolving pandemic infectious disease decision support simulation model. CSHI also wrote the code and provides training and support for the Advanced Incident Management System (AIMS) which is the ESF 8 management software for the Alabama Department of Public Health during disasters.   Using AIMS, CSHI is a part of the public health disaster response Patient Transfer Center, which CSHI supports from its own emergency medical operations center.  During Katrina, CSHI and AIMS provided 24x7 support for public health in managing information from over 80 hospitals and 7 medical needs shelters located throughout the state. Under Carl’s leadership AIMS has grown from 7 users during Hurricane Ivan to over 800 users today both within the Continental United States and the Virgin Islands. AIMS has been translated into Spanish and German and was recently voted “the best” disaster support software tool at the Strong Angel Exercise in San Diego.  

Beyond developing and deploying technology, Carl works on strategic partnerships to bridge the gap between the .edu and .com environments. These partnerships focus on early stage emerging companies, other academic institutions, and large companies both within the United States and abroad. The common bond between these relationships is the ability to create a synergy of effort to drive knowledge to the market.
Carl is a frequent speaker on the future of health care and medical needs in disaster response and has published several peer reviewed articles on the role of technology in managing surge capacity in disasters. He is the author of a chapter on disaster response in the newly released three volume work entitled The Business of Healthcare.

He holds an undergraduate degree from Marshall University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Miami.