Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Making Your CIO Irrelevant

It may be surprising to hear this at an information technology show, but there's some suggestion here that CIOs will go the way of the dinosaurs. OK, that might be an exaggeration. I don’t think my five-year old son will be digging up your CIO's bones when he becomes a paleontologist in 20 years or so. At least I hope he won't!

At any rate, there’s been a healthy and useful discussion throughout some of my meetings about the changing role of the CIO. Or more to the point, the need to make health IT to be a clinician-led endeavor.

"We’ve been given a sacred responsibility," William Bria, M.D., chief medical information officer at Shriners Hospitals for Children said last night a dinner event held by AHA Solutions. "We need to realign our goals," he said around patient care, not around CMS' goals or incentive payments or other political priorities. To do that, physicians needed to be front and center.

David Muntz, VP and CIO at Baylor Health Care System, and Tom Balcezak, M.D., associate chief of staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who shared the podium with Bria concurred. Muntz added that for years the CIO's role has really been the Chief Data Officer. That has to change. Technology needs to provide clinicians with useful information, not just data for data's sake.

"We need to get IT as part of the overall clinical team," Deane Morrison, CIO at Capital Region Healthcare, which runs the 230-bed Concord Hospital. He said CIOs—and the rest of IT—need to essentially let clinicians lead projects and get the credit for successful deployments. It's also imperative to change the focus from an IT deployment to outcomes and improved care, said John Frownfelter, M.D., CMIO at Henry Ford Health System. Both Morrison and Frownfelter spoke during a breakfast sponsored by McKesson. Interestingly, both men said that their hospitals are unlikely to apply for meaningful use incentive money in fiscal 2011 and part of the thinking is making sure that their IT objectives mesh with their overall clinical goals.

The issue of clinician engagement is also coming up with vendors. Some are beginning to recognize the need for practicing docs and nurses to be involved in product design. It saves everyone time and money in the long run, says Angie Franks, president and CEO of Healthland, which sells IT solutions to rural hospitals. In developing its new CPOE product, for instance, Healthland recruited 23 docs from 23 hospitals to be involved in product development from the start. Healthland let the docs hammer out different workflow issues. They used the same process for a nurse documentation system. The process may have added to the product development timeline, says Franks, but it has resulted in a product that won't need to retooled and retooled again.

1 comments:

Spencer said...

While the concept of a CIO at institutions such as Henry Ford and Baylor are likely to come to fruition within the next few years, there are a large number of small to mid-market facilities where financial pressures on capital expenditures and an ever increasing necessity for technology to drive efficiency is the norm. While Capital Regional and Henry Ford will likely not apply for incentive funding, I know a number of rural organizations that are writing checks for technology investments and crossing their fingers that incentive monies will help cover those checks. For some reason, the majority of publications covering health IT these days sound more and more like AT&T and the claim that AT&T "covers 97% of Americans". Well, that may be great, but that still leaves 9.2 million Americans not covered. While that may be acceptable for a private wireless company, I believe that the small and mid-market hospitals and physician practices spread across the U.S. need reliable information about how to effectively implement HIT...which is different than what is appropriate implementation methodologies for large academic, multi-facility organizations that bring in more money annually through their foundations than many of these facility's annual gross revenue.

Regarding the role that clinicians should play in technology implementations, I agree with your assessment. I agree that clinicians should play a primary role in the selection and deployment of clinical solutions, but the role of the CIO in many organizations will continue to be relevant. However, the role will be different than it has been in the past. No longer will the CIO be able to double-talk their way out of a difficult situation with clinicians. Instead, the CIO will have to be an expert collaborator with significant political savvy to support their efforts.

CIO's that fail to adapt to the "new" methods of supporting healthcare operations will become irrelevant. However, those able to successfully adapt their technological, business and political savvy to the new environment will likely succeed.

Spencer Hamons

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