CIOs, CMIOs Want a New Focus
HDM Breaking News, April 8, 2009
CIOs and CMIOs long for the day when they can focus most of their time and effort on health care quality improvement rather than technology implementation. That was one message a panel offered at the 2009 HIMSS Conference April 7 in Chicago.
Within five years, chief medical information officers and CIOs will be devoting much more time to using data mining and business intelligence to analyze data to support quality improvement, says Rick Schooler, CIO at Orlando (Fla.) Regional Healthcare. The executives will “go beyond just getting the right I.T. in place,” focusing instead on using data to change the practice of medicine, he says.
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“I don’t want to be perceived as the I.T. guy,” Schooler adds. “I want to be viewed as a leader who’s an impact player in the organization.”
“I’m tired of being an implementer,” adds Steve Margolis, M.D., CMIO at Orlando Regional. “I want to contribute to the quality of patient care.”
Margolis also hopes to devote more time to “making it easier for doctors to do their jobs” by refining their workflows to take full advantage of I.T.
CIOs and CMIOs need to work as a team that backs each other up, says Patricia Skarulis, vice president and CIO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The CIO says that when CMIO David Artz, M.D. was hired, she asked that he report to her rather than the chief medical officer so they could closely collaborate. “We sometimes substitute for each other in meetings,” she points out.
Artz says he works with the I.T. department to “share the philosophy” behind a technology implementation. “I help steer the ship,” Artz says. “I make sure we’re going in the right direction.”
“Given that the CIO is expert in his domain and I am in my domain, we are going to have differences of opinions,” Margolis says. “But we have to trust each other” to present a united front to clinicians and administrators alike, he adds.
To stay connected with physicians, Margolis says he spends time in the doctor’s lounge early every morning. “They’ll tell me about things that do or do not work.”
As a result, Schooler says he meets several times a day with Margolis to discuss physicians’ needs and “stay on the same page.”
--Howard Anderson
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