It was one of those conversations that had me scratching my head hours — and even days — later. At last year’s HIMSS conference, I was talking to a highly respected leader in the industry about healthsystemCIO.com and our vision for the future of the site. I told him we were looking to enhance our webinar offering and continue to build our network of CIOs (largely through podcast interviews), but that our main focus would remain the same. To us, it’s all about what successful CIOs are doing at their organizations, and how.
I was expecting him to offer approval, saying something like, “That sounds good.” But instead, he threw a bit of a curveball my way, suggesting that perhaps we were on the wrong track; that our message was in danger of growing stale. He believed we were hurting ourselves by concentrating our efforts on issues like major system implementations, because most CIOs had already gotten over the hump, and that it was time to look further down the road.
I was floored. Although I recognize that a significant chunk of organizations are fully electronic, there are still a number of CIOs who still have miles to go. And even for many of those who have gone live or updated to the most recent version, there are still hurdles — lots of them. I thought back to the many interviews I’ve conducted and edited over the past few years, and I couldn’t recall one CIO saying, “Yeah, that EHR stuff is old hat.” I haven’t detected boredom in one voice.
In fact, it’s quite the contrary. Most of the time when I’m speaking with a CIO, the frustration and the exhaustion are palpable. Even for those who are in a fairly good position in terms of meeting Meaningful Use and preparing for ICD-10, it’s clear that no one is in cruise control.
George Brenckle, CIO at UMass Memorial Healthcare, put it best when he recently stated, “I never wake up in the morning saying, ‘What am I going to do today?’” So although some CIOs might make it look easy (or at least feasible) to keep all the balls in the air, in reality it’s a constant juggling act that must be performed under extreme pressure.
It reminds me of the scene from Apollo 13, one of my favorite movies, when the crew is holding a press conference before the ill-fated mission, and a reporter said to Commander Jim Lovell: “Does it bother you that the public regards this flight as routine?”
Lovell’s character, played by Tom Hanks, simply stated, “There’s nothing routine about flying to the moon. I can vouch for that.”
That’s how I imagine many CIOs must feel. No matter how much experience they might have, or how advanced the organization is from an IT standpoint, there are always challenges. And there is always something that can be learned by listening to colleagues — whether it’s the CIO of a bleeding-edge, Stage 7 organization, or the CIO/Chief Security Officer of a 25-bed hospital.
Because the bleeding-edge health system might be far behind when it comes to patient engagement, and can learn from a smaller hospital that’s found success. On the other hand, a smaller hospital might be seeking best practices for joining an ACO. Where one organization thrives, another might be struggling.
There’s always something to learn.
So although we believe it’s always important to think about what’s next, and how we can help our readers prepare for what’s down the road, we also believe it’s important not to get too far ahead of ourselves and assume everyone’s over the hump. Because I think we can all agree that there’s nothing routine about being a CIO.
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