healthsystemcio.com

With the government piling on its Meaningful Use regulations, healthcare CIOs are under a lot of pressure to bring home the incentive bacon. For some, relaxation takes on traditional forms such as vacationing, biking or running. But Deane Morrison is no regular CIO. When he wants to decompress, it’s time to scale a mountain, perhaps [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Concord Hospital CIO Deane Morrison, Chapter 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A house is only as strong as the foundation on which it’s built. And an application environment is only as sound as the network infrastructure and data center upon which it rests. As such, Will Showalter and Sisters of Mercy Health System have undertaken a rebuild of their foundation to support the more than 4,000 [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Sisters of Mercy Health System VP & CIO Will Showalter, Chapter 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While just about every CIO in healthcare can be described as intelligent, only a handful deserve to be called wise. One of those is undoubtedly M. D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Lynn Vogel. And Vogel is not the kind of CIO to keep all that wisdom to himself. As such, he’s an active educator in both [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center VP & CIO Lynn Vogel, Chapter 2 [12:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (429)

Building on a recent post about Peter Orszag’s resignation, and stimulus funding for healthcare IT…As long as we’re throwing money around by the billions… If I were Dr. Blumenthal, I’d dangle $500M ala DARPA in front of Amazon, Google, Nintendo, Facebook, salesforce, eBay– or any other capable body– and sponsor a shoot out: Build an inpatient/outpatient EMR and financial management system that will rock our world.

An overwhelming majority of CIOs are both pleased with how public comments impacted the final Meaningful Use regulation and optimistic about their ability to meet it, according to the July healthsystemCIO.com SnapSurvey; however a majority of those same CIOs thought it far less likely that the “average” hospital will make the grade.
And the apparent bullishness [...]

In my previous post about Where will 50,000 come from?, the need for more skilled health IT workers was discussed as well as where these individuals might be found.  Here we are, just past mid-2010 and there are many health system CIOs, vendors and consulting firms looking to hire qualified IT leaders and staff.  Many [...]

The days of associating small hospitals with low-tech facilities are slowly fading in the past. One reason is that the small, including critical access, hospitals (CAHs) are not exempt from the HITECH programs carrots … or sticks. But sometimes being small does mean being resource constrained and, in that environment, doing any kind of rip [...]

After working for more than a year to develop its Meaningful Use and Certification rules, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) are focused on ensuring healthcare providers know how to enroll in the soon-to-be-launched incentive program.
 In a “free training” session held by [...]

Picis, a provider of ED, OR and ICU systems, is being acquired by Ingenix. “With the final Meaningful Use rules released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on July 13 designating the ED as a covered inpatient care area, Picis’ clients in this area will have new opportunities to recoup their investments [...]

Can current EMR systems produce the kinds of reports that will be required to demonstrate Meaningful Use? If not, where does that leave providers? HIS Pros Says: The temporary EHR certification rule released by ONC requires certified systems to be capable of reporting the numerator, denominator and percentage for each measure detailed by CMS in the final meaningful use rule. (See §170.302(n) in the certification rule). This requirement was not in the proposed rule and was added as a response to numerous comments urging ONC to include requirements that reduce the burden on provider organizations to evaluate and demonstrate compliance with the percentage measures, as well as increase the accuracy and reliability of provider reporting.

Though HITECH may have some questioning their physician integration strategy — especially the part about underwriting EMRs using the Stark relaxations — it hasn’t deterred Inova Health and its CIO Geoff Brown one bit. In fact, Brown thinks strengthening those key relationships is more important than ever. Heartened by the industry’s move towards standards and [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Inova Health System SVP & CIO Geoff Brown, Chapter 3 [16:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (217)

A house is only as strong as the foundation on which it’s built. And an application environment is only as sound as the network infrastructure and data center upon which it rests. As such, Will Showalter and Sisters of Mercy Health System have undertaken a rebuild of their foundation to support the more than 4,000 [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Sisters of Mercy Health System VP & CIO Will Showalter, Chapter 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Much of what will become Meaningful Use Stage 2 can be found in the recently released Stage 1, according to comments from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Tony Trenkle, who spoke during this month’s HIT Policy Committee meeting. Meaningful Use Stage 2, he said, will expand on Stage 1 by making the current “menu” set part of future core requirements. Trenkle, director of the CMS Office of e-Health Standards and Services, said the organization also wanted to get certain administrative requirements — which were included in the NPRM but dropped from the final regulation— along higher CPOE levels, into Stage 2.

In the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage stars as Ben Sanderson, a Hollywood screenwriter who’s lost everything and moves to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. I’m not going to set out to drink myself to death because John is leaving Partners, but as one of my colleagues said, “It’s a big deal, John. This marks the end of an era.”

While pleased with some aspects of the final Meaningful Use Stage 1 rule, CHIME still views it as “an aggressive target for the majority of the nation’s hospitals,” according to an early analysis by the organization. Additionally, CHIME is predicting that many hospitals will have a difficult time qualifying for stimulus funding in subsequent stages of the incentive program, “as objectives increase in number and become harder to meet, and as other aspects of the stimulus program become more challenging.”

All good managers know the key to getting optimal performance is not issuing prescriptive directives but communicating high-level goals, allowing the magical properties of ownership to foster a positive outcome. When people are told what needs to be done (treated like adults) they act like adults, think creatively, go beyond the minimum and often produce [...]

This summer has been a “hot” one, in fact for the record books, with record highs for most states in the 90s and sometimes the 100s.  Heat wave or not, for those of you interviewing this summer (and congratulations if you are) the dress code is still Business Formal. I mentioned this because of some recent [...]

In ITIL, we healthcare CIOs are acting in predictable fashion by following the “Most Popular Practice” as opposed to the “Best Practice.” Before we pull the trigger on yet another silver bullet savior of process, I urge all of us to look closely at the contribution of burdensome process in the woes of Toyota…and GE…and [...]

I expected this past weekend to be devoted to thinking about final MU changes, however my attention was drawn to the announcement about Verizon’s entry into the HIE arena. It appears Verizon has launched a Web-based health exchange, something of which I have been advocating for the past year or so, and teamed up with several other players to make it work. MedVirginia, a private health exchange operated in Virginia; Medfx, a company knowledgeable in cloud based health care and practice management solutions; and Oracle for its transaction systems, databases and indices. It’s a good model, as it provides knowledge in the practical operation of an exchange and technology necessary to power it across the Web. But it seems to me the new offering — as bold as it is — has missed a critical component. All of this effort is aimed at moving data from one point to another, but where is the skill set to use that data to transform the way providers deliver care, and what metrics will be used to assess quality?

While just about every CIO in healthcare can be described as intelligent, only a handful deserve to be called wise. One of those is undoubtedly M. D. Anderson Cancer Center’s Lynn Vogel. And Vogel is not the kind of CIO to keep all that wisdom to himself. As such, he’s an active educator in both [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center VP & CIO Lynn Vogel, Chapter 1 [16:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (126)

Though there are thousands of Meditech hospitals, only a handful are in the in the process of migrating from the Magic to 6.0 platform. Of course, those hospitals (and their CIOs) are being watched very closely by the Meditech community. One of those CIOs is Ed Ricks of Beaufort Memorial Hospital. Ricks is not only [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Beaufort Memorial Hospital VP of IS & CIO Ed Ricks, Chapter 3 [9:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (157)

Though HITECH may have some questioning their physician integration strategy — especially the part about underwriting EMRs using the Stark relaxations — it hasn’t deterred Inova Health and its CIO Geoff Brown one bit. In fact, Brown thinks strengthening those key relationships is more important than ever. Heartened by the industry’s move towards standards and [...]

 

 PODCAST: One-on-One w/Inova Health System SVP & CIO Geoff Brown, Chapter 2 [12:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (137)

In what’s become an epic (excuse me) battle for the heart and soul of sound CIO strategy, I continually hear the emergence of two camps — the enterprise, one-vendor-for-all folks, and the cobble-it-together best-of-breed/suite folks. In interviews with CIOs of each type, I hear different levels of derision directed at the other camp. None of [...]