Beyond the Buzzwords

When a job is enormous, complex and entails a sea of change to accomplish, it is very tempting to sit on the sidelines and ride out the status quo. Fortunately, many forward-thinking CMOs, CIOs, CMIOs, CCIOs and CTOs are focused on—and deeply engaged in—leveraging information technology to accelerate the innovation process to improve the value of the healthcare this nation delivers.

Closer collaboration with IT vendor partners will be required, and a great example is the work that Massachusetts General Hospital and the American College of Radiology have done to leverage speech recognition vendor Nuance’s cloud network for point-of-care clinical decision support delivery.

While hospitals, physician practices and the federal government have spent heavily to consolidate patient information in electronic medical records, access to that information by caregivers and patients continues to be a challenge. Read about the work that Geisinger Health System is doing to optimize patient data access through a greater reliance on application programming interfaces.

Ultimately, all of the patient data that health systems are collecting should result in a “learning” healthcare system, says HCA CMO Jonathan Perlin, MD, PhD, MHSA. In describing the system’s work in parlaying the digital capture of the care experience into clinical quality improvement, Perlin said it all: “If we’re smart about it, we create knowledge and reapply it as wisdom in the next care cycle. Imagine how well-informed the future can be.”