CMIO Summit: Expertise Face to Face With a Side of Networking

Regardless of whether you're new to the clinical IT trenches, or well-entrenched, you should plan to attend the Clinical IT Leadership Forum: "Beyond The EMR: Finding Real Innovations to Heal Healthcare" on June 10 in Boston. We'll tell you why.

What we've seen over the last 10 years is a huge growth in the number and complexity of IT projects. We're not just talking about bringing computers into the hospital anymore; now we're bringing clinical decision support tools and complex workflows to provider care scenarios ranging from acute care to ambulatory environments, in order to deliver at-the-moment information for providers and patients to get the most value from the interactions. For the CMIO or IT executive to be an effective leader, he or she needs to have a broader knowledge as well as a deeper knowledge in the space.

Our concept for the meeting is to have very experienced CMIOs and IT leaders from a variety of academic and community organizations of various sizes present topics in their area of expertise. They'll be addressing the questions we're all asking right now. CMIOs will talk about projects and challenges they have either accomplished or are in the middle of doing right now—with plenty of time for questions and answers.

This conference puts together an array of thought leaders covering areas that are critical to not only new CMIOs who are just trying to learn more about these areas, but also to experienced CMIOs. As veterans, we tend to be so busy that we focus on only a couple of areas, but we need to learn more about other issues.

Agenda topics will include:

Organizational leadership—the relationship between the CMIO and CMO. Health IT governance—how you prioritize what projects move forward, and how you make sure the prioritization involves the clinicians and maintains buy-in. That’s what facilitates IT adoption. HIEs—We’re going to talk about how to actually get value out of an HIE for your own health system and what the role the CMIO must play. What is working, how to make it a business model that actually works, and is fundable and is not just another good idea in the abstract. Clinical decision support—Again, what have your peers done that works and is generalizable? This won’t be a theoretical drug/drug-drug/allergy talk; It will be about what they did that actually stuck. For more information, visit CMIOSummit.com

We're also going to examine the role the CMIO must play in meaningful use initiatives. If you're going to align your health system strategy with the federal goals and program funded through ONC for meaningful use, what do you need to pay attention to, and what do you need to be thinking about not only for Stage 1 but also for Stage 2 and Stage 3? How can you do this so your organization can benefit? It's not just about the dollars, and it's not just about throwing your strategy up and following federal guidelines. To some degree, the flexibility of the guidelines enables you to tailor your strategy to your own organization, for more lasting and local value.

Since we're all still learning our own lessons from our own mistakes, the conference includes roundtables to facilitate discussions about issues that individual CMIOs can share with their peers. We'll share input and feedback on each others' projects, providing tactical value to bring back to our organizations.

It won't be academic or theoretical, but experience-based information that will give the participants something to take home and really feel comfortable saying "I just spoke to the people who are doing this and this is what they're saying." We want to give participating CMIOs the voice of experience that they can take away with them.