“Do everything you do really well,” advises David Lundal, vice president and regional CIO at Dean Health System in Madison, Wis. That way, when you’re undertaking one of today’s great healthcare IT challenges, “the organization trusts you, in IT, and has confidence you’re going to be able to pull it off.”
That would be good advice at any time, but I was particularly asking him and other technology leaders I spoke with for advice they would give other CIOs for my recent story Healthcare IT In The Obamacare Era. In it, I looked at the rise of accountable care organizations, the broader population health management trend, and the regulatory pressures hitting healthcare IT organizations from all sides this year.
“Get over it,” advises Bill Spooner, CIO at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego. “We’ve seen other industries go through these revolutions, and you’re either agile or you’re done — that’s the real world. Everybody’s got to be a lot more progressive and aggressive. That said, we’re in a really crazy time.”
He acknowledged that 2014 looks like a particularly tough year, with requirements like the transition to ICD-10 diagnosis and claims coding and additional meaningful use deadlines hitting while a sweeping transition to value-based, accountable care is under way. Regulators and lawmakers “seem to be thinking that, as quickly as they can imagine it, we can implement it in healthcare.”
I cited Spooner in another recent column, What Consumer-Driven Healthcare Really Means. He recognizes that patient engagement is going to be more than a nice-to-have frill; it’s an essential component as healthcare organizations take more responsibility for ensuring the health of a population of patients. In Medicare ACOs, patients aren’t compelled to stay within the network of the healthcare organization taking responsibility for them. That makes it imperative for the organization to persuade patients that it is the best, most convenient, and most responsive organization.
Successful ACOs also need some more basic things, such as a good master patient index they can use to develop a registry of the patients enrolled in the ACO so their care can be tracked effectively, Spooner said. “My advice to fellow CIOs would be talk to your colleagues. Look for the pioneers, and learn from them. Like with every area of strategy, get yourself at the table, so you’re part of the process.” Otherwise, a healthcare organization’s leaders have a tendency to charge ahead into “very clever business arrangements, and sometimes in IT, we’ve had to catch up.”
David Muntz, a former hospital CIO better known for his tenure as deputy director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, agrees that the job of healthcare CIO is getting much harder. He now serves as senior vice president and CIO at GetWellNetwork, an online service focused on boosting patient engagement. He said he regrets being part of the process of piling so many regulatory requirements on healthcare organizations so fast. The number of initiatives hospitals must undertake is increasing, while margins are dropping and new reimbursement models are being imposed. “All these transitions are happening simultaneously.”
How to cope? One thing he suggests is putting an emphasis on change management — and not just for the IT staff. “When are we going to teach the physicians how to do change management?” Leaders in the ranks of doctors and nurses also have to understand “the science of getting people to change both behavior and attitudes” to achieve real change in how the organization does business, beyond what is programmed into the software they use.
Date: Feb 24, 2014