My Journey To Professional Oblivion And Back Again

Daniel Morreale, VP/CIO, Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center

“We have decided to make a change in IT leadership.” Not exactly the words you want to hear on a Wednesday afternoon. But I knew it was coming, so it was not a surprise. First off, it was a Wednesday and my CEO always fired people on a Wednesday. Secondly, he and I were a [...]

Share

The Petitio Principii of ACOs

The serious lack of infrastructure to support an expansive and meaningful ACO strategy is missing from the healthcare technology toolkit. Some may view this as a non critical issue but with so many organizations engaged in some form of ACO activity, we have to ask, “Have we begged the question?” It seems to me we [...]

Share

The Dash to ACOs Is Headed For a Brick Wall

Federal health care reform has generated immense interest in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). In theory, improved quality and reduced cost will be gleaned by bundled payment of a health system and the physician. To attain this, however, and to improve quality and reduce cost, there will have to be good communication and a strong relationship, [...]

Share

Is Self-Certifying the Path to Tranquility?

As Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism once said “The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” When I first read the announcement from CCHIT in November that they had a process for Hospitals to self certify their EHR Environment for Meaningful Use, I was thrown back to ancient eastern philosophy [...]

Share

Forget Everything You Know About Healthcare Information Systems

Oscar Wilde once wrote that “Everything popular is wrong,” and I think that time has come for healthcare information systems. Now, granted Health information technology (HIT) has come a long way from its infancy as a means to produce a bill. As the use of EHRs expanded beyond basic clinical information and began to encompass [...]

Share

A Physics Lesson for Healthcare

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.” Martin Luther King once said. The Healthcare delivery system is on the verge of change. It will take hard work from all of us to us to make it happen. I like to look at it terms of structure and change. Structure being the underlying construct of the healthcare system and change the process by which we struggle to manifest a new delivery model. The federal Government has outlined a structure.

Share

When It Comes to ACOs, Uncertainty is Our Companion

Command and control was the traditional means of management, but it is not well suited for the complex healthcare organizations of the 21st century. Healthcare today demands flexibility, transparency, and quality. Under pressure from increased regulations and declining reimbursements, healthcare needs to grab the attention of the consumer. To do this we must be transparent, [...]

Share

Collaborative Care – The Thing After HIEs

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “Build today a firm and ample base and ascending and secure shall tomorrow find its place.” We CIOs in healthcare have been building a firm and ample based over that past decade. Not that many of us thought in terms of building a foundation when dealing with the hazards and [...]

Share

The HIE Equation: “A Prudent Question is 1/2 of Wisdom”

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?

Share